


Some Nights

by Kirjavi



Category: Everyman HYBRID
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alternate Canon, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Rating May Change, Reader-Interactive, final girl Steph AU, please talk to me about emh lore, semi-canonical
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:01:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 43,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25580242
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirjavi/pseuds/Kirjavi
Summary: She dies quietly, on her belly, eyes closed. She wakes up quietly, on her belly, eyes closed. Steph refuses to die ignominiously again.What if Steph didn't die? What if Stephdoesn'tdie? What would change? And what would stay the same?Alternately: the wheel of fate runs a flat. Pageantry grinds to a halt, and theatrical roles changes hands.
Relationships: Evan/Stephanie (Everyman HYBRID), Jessa/Stephanie (one-sided)
Comments: 17
Kudos: 29





	1. Cover Page

**Author's Note:**

> Named after "Some Nights (Intro)" by fun., specifically when he sings "There are some nights I wait for someone to save us/ But I never look inward, tried not to look upward/ And some nights I pray a sign is gonna come to me/ But usually, I'm just trying to get some sleep", and even more specifically the way Nate Reuss howls the words "Some nights!" as furiously as it is triumphantly. It's a very Steph song to me.
> 
> Alternate title: "just like all those times before", from the graffiti we see on the walls in the "Finding Fairmount" video.

This is, as succinctly as I can put it, a ‘final girl Steph’ AU masquerading as a canon-verse sequel to the EMH canon we saw in the YouTube series and assorted ARG components. As a result, this will require no small amount of readers’ suspension of disbelief—many characters and their subsequent relations to each other will reappear as they did in canon, just shifted to a new iteration’s context, even though in-canon that might not make sense. There will also be some crossovers with other Slenderverse series, although I will try to write it in such a way that you do not need to be familiar with those series in order to read this fic.

There will be a small interactive element attached to this fic. Everything in this fic, which may or may not include author’s notes and tags, may be considered in-game. There will be a Tumblr that will be considered in-game, and the URL will be dropped when it becomes relevant (if you have not found it already). My own personal Tumblr @a-flickering-soul will be considered out-of-game and will always be open for hints. There will be no other interactive elements—I highly doubt this will get enough readers to warrant a gamejacking warning, but for what it’s worth, if you attempt to gamejack you will gain nothing and I will be very annoyed. The Tumblr blog will not be considered open RP, but you are welcome and encouraged to interact! Please do not attempt to interact as canonical Slenderverse characters because I do not have the patience to seed your interactions into the plot. There will be (in my opinion) relatively easy puzzles that will have a certain effect on the plot scattered throughout the fic, but again the primary focus is the fic! Don’t expect too much from the puzzles--consider them a little treat :)

About half of this has been pre-written, so I’ll be coming out with two chapters a month-ish until I run out of what I have stocked up, then it’ll all be in real time as I write. The Tumblr will be updated on the same timeline as the fic--meaning that if a month passes in-fic, a month passes on the Tumblr. Our time has no correspondence with the timeline on the in-game Tumblr.

That’s pretty much all I have to say! This is heavily inspired by @decaydentdeer’s Final Girl Steph art on Tumblr--please go check them out, they are amazing!

Enjoy—and don’t forget to feed the Habit.


	2. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She feels as if she wakes up, again and again and again, with nothing to show for it.

Steph wakes up on her stomach, curled up around emptiness. She doesn't open her eyes. Everything hurts hurts _hurts_ , and she whimpers quietly, bundling herself up into the stained roughness of her flannel. The ache grows and intensifies to a white-hot pain, searing her guts until she can feel it in her teeth, then passes.

For an eternal, perfect moment, she floats in nothingness. She is nothing, and the millions of billions of particles that make up StephanieDamselLover _Mother_ drifts apart into nothing and it is bliss.

And then she wakes up, and she is so suddenly bereft that she could sob.

She looks up, looks around--piercing blue sky, goldy-green grass, a tree reaching up with spindly arms--and all of her memories rush back to her. All of them, across every iteration. She is a scared child, coughing up black tar in her father's arms. She is an art student far, far away from anyone she might recognize as her family, and she dies alone not knowing she doesn't have to be. She is a survivor, and she got to hold her greatest creation in her arms for all of a few months before she, too, was ripped away..

Her heart _aches_ down to her gut but she is whole and unscathed. She stands up. Her legs are as strong as ever.

A shout makes her whip her head around. "Stephie!"

"Dad," she whispers, then louder, "Dad!"

Dr. James Corenthal jogs toward her, just like the way he came to her when she pitched her first softball or scraped her knee when she was a kid. He holds out his arms wide and she runs into them and buries her face in his chest.

"Oh, sweetheart," he says. His hand comes up to cup the back of her head and a sob, ugly and jagged, tears its way out of her throat. "You had a rough go of it, didn't you?"

She nods into his shirt, gasping in half-breaths as she tries to get herself under control.

"I'm sorry." He pulls back and cradles her cheek. "I'm so sorry, sweetheart. Rest now. Jeff’s already here and I have a feeling the other two won’t be too long." 

She remembers the rules of this Habitat--this small Eden, is theirs, but outside of the boundaries her father had built, it's free range, and at night the walls are thin. Things can creep in and out--sometimes those things are benign, but mostly they are not.

“I have to go,” he says gently, and her fingers curl reflectively in his shirt like a child. “I’ll be back as soon as possible, sweetheart, I promise.”

“I know,” she says. She _does_ know--she has every single iteration’s life experience shoved into her skull. Countless times she’s been here, watching her father go to try to protect whoever of their tattered family was still outside. “Vinnie and Evan–”

“I know.” She watches her father’s face grow older before her eyes. “Jeff filled me in. I really thought—” He pinches the bridge of his nose and lets out a sigh. “I really thought this one might stick.”

“We all did.” She allows a note of bitterness to seep into her voice. “Evan’s gone deep this time. Quickly, too.”

“What hap–” James sees the undisguised anguish flash over her face and wisely chooses to drop the subject. “Well, either way, what happens will happen and we can begin again. Right, Stephie-girl?” He ruffles her hair and smiles, trying to coax a matching one out of her .

It works, and she lets go of his shirt. “Be safe,” she says, like she always does. “I’m going to rest for a bit, then find Jeff.”

“All right.” James leans over and kisses her forehead the way he used to, more than thirty years ago. “I love you, sweetheart.”

“Love you too, Dad.”

He nods once, sharply, then turns to stand, hand going to the holster at his side. He paces a few steps forward, looking for some sign or discrepancy in the land only he can see, then _steps_ and disappears into thin air. Her head fuzzes slightly as reality slips around her, then her vision solidifies and he is gone again.

Steph looks around, up at the bountiful sun, then back down to her feet. She sits down in the grass, buries her head in her hands, and tries not to think about the smell of her baby’s head and how she had just begun to babble.

* * *

Time passes differently here. One golden day could pass in the blink of an eye, then the night could last for what felt like years.

Steph finds a tree to crouch under and cry like an animal being gutted—which in an ironic way isn’t hard to imagine at all, given how her last iteration ended.

This had been the worst one yet, and it’s _sick_ , cosmically cruel that this most sadistic iteration had been the closest they’d been to making a breakthrough. Things were adding up more now, with outside help pouring in and support from strangers throughout the internet—they were so much closer than they had ever been before, but the cost—

_It isn’t about her_ , she keeps reminding herself. _It’s about humanity, about getting rid of bad habits._

Doesn’t stop it from hurting.

She can still see it, still feel it—her baby girl being torn apart before her eyes, how everything in her mind recoiled and revolted at the sight of Habit wearing her lover’s eyes like gloves, the pain she went through and how much she ached for the release of death.

It’s a mark of how fucked the linear passage of time becomes here that when she finally picks her head up and dries her eyes, the sun is still out.

She gets up and starts looking for Jeff. A perk of this middle ground, of being dead-but-not-quite, is that it’s fairly easy to pick out the energy signatures of her brother. She closes her eyes and orients herself like a compass. Jeff’s soul is like—the green of sunlight through leaves, teeth glinting in a smile, the crack of a fist through a windowpane. Distinct.

She sets off toward the setting sun.

Steph finds Jeff sitting by the tree, back hunched, staring into nothing. “Hey,” she says, then as he doesn’t react, “Hey!”

His head jerks up, startled. “Steph!” He smiles, and it reaches his eyes, then realization comes. “Oh no, are you—”

“Yeah,” she says. “Who did you lose this round?” It’s become a gallows-type joke between the two of them—consistently, it’s the two of them that seem to get the short end of the stick when it comes to interpersonal relationships.

His mouth twists and he pretends to think. “My parents, first off.” He starts counting on his fingers as he lists off people. “They count as two. Then my girlfriend, my dog, and my brother.”

She sits down next to him and leans against his shoulder. He sighs and relaxes against her. It’s not hard for them to slip into the easy familiarity of their childhood. “What about you?” asks Jeff, quiet, kind-hearted.

“Oof,” says Steph, and she chokes back an aborted sob. “Uh, my parents and siblings. That’s four. Then my friend. Then my baby.”

Jeff’s eyes fill with sorrow. “Oh, Steph. Oh no,” he says softly. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugs, one-armed. “It’s done,” she says. “It’s just another iteration.”

Jeff in his kindness does not call her on her lie. “Just another iteration,” he agrees.

They sit there in silence, watching the light begin to fade into the oranges and reds and brilliant purples of sunset.

“’S getting dark,” he says eventually. “Wanna head to the house?”

He stands up and offers her a hand. She takes it and he pulls her up easily. They walk in companionable quiet to the hunched shadow of the old, broken-down house where they usually make their stand for the night.

This is how the Ark, this weird in-between plane, works: it is Habit’s land, but this small chunk of it is theirs. They can come in and out of the Garden, if they know how. Their spawnpoint, if you will.

Just because this piece of the Ark is theirs, though, doesn’t mean it’s safe. Habit can still inHabit people—each of them has taken to carrying pairs of handcuffs on them if any one of their little party shows signs of acting a bit erratic . And it doesn’t stop Habit from sending its Rabbits in to fuck with them. Each night, when the barriers their father established are thin, it’s not uncommon for whoever’s available to sleep in shifts, one person always awake to raise the alarm if they have an unwanted visitor.

Steph’s never asked her father what he does before one of them dies and comes back in the Ark, how he spends the long nights by himself. He’s never offered, but the haggard look in his eyes only gets worse every time she comes back.

She misses her mom—Maryann always had a calming effect on him. Reminded him that he was only human, after all. Steph hopes she’s okay, wherever she is.

The stash of weapons is still where it always was, knives and bats and tools stacked carefully at the back of the shack. “Dibs on the hatchet,” Steph says, flicking a look up at Jeff.

He laughs and breaks into a run down the worn path through the grass. Cursing his lanky legs and feeling, to her surprise, a laugh bubbling up through her lungs, Steph chases after him.

He ends up beating her, but he still tosses her the hatchet. Reflexively, she catches it, her hand wrapping familiarly around its notched wooden handle.

“I’ll take first watch,” she says.

Jeff doesn’t argue, hiding a yawn behind his hand. He picks out a baseball bat, nasty-looking nails embedded at its tip, and keeps it within arms’ reach as he sets up his bedroll. “Don’t do the whole night,” he warns. “Wake me up when you need a break.”

“I will,” she promises, then she is alone with her thoughts once again.

The moon takes its time rising. Here, it’s always full. It seems quiet tonight, though—no warped and twisted half-human Rabbits coming through the boundaries to snap at them. The sound of Jeff’s breathing fills the quiet—steady, slow. It puts her at ease—it’s familiar, having another person around.

She watches the moon rise, achingly slow, and tries not to think. She fails.

She doesn’t end up waking Jeff up.

* * *

The third night Steph is back in the Ark, they get an attack.

She finally caves in and sleeps that night—it’s not like they need to sleep or anything here (don’t need to eat either, for that matter) but after a while the monotony, however peaceful, starts to grind on her. Sleeping, most of the time, is the only reliable way to mark the passage of time. Jeff ends up taking the first shift, so she curls herself up in the tattered blanket and shuts her eyes, letting the ambient sound of the crickets outside lull her to sleep. Already, she is anticipating oblivion, if only for a few hours.

She wakes four hours later to Jeff frantically shaking her. “Grab your axe,” he hisses. “Something’s here.”

She can feel the intruders’ signatures lying thick on her tongue and prickling her skin—like the stink of rotting flesh made physical. This close to them, direction is clouded, like a foul smell too intense to sense location. Her fingers curl around the hatchet’s handle and she rises to a crouch as slowly and as quietly as she can. “Where?” she whispers.

Jeff points with his chin to the right, towards the forest that borders the shack. “I saw three of them before I woke you up.”

“We can do that.” She looks at him. “We’ve done like. . . what, seven before with two people? It’s fine. We can do that.”

Jeff nods. “We can do this.”

They cautiously get to their feet. Jeff wraps his hands around the baseball bat and hefts it familiarly. The spiked nails hiss viciously through the air as he gives it a test swing. “You take left, I take right?” he says.

She nods. The blue light of the moon paints him in silver and shadow.

They come out of the shack backs to each other, each facing a separate direction. This is something they have practiced for ages now, and put into use. Every one of her senses is pricked up and alert. She scans the forest with eyes that are still waking up, trusting her artist’s gaze to catch the difference between stillness and movement.

She catches a flicker of movement as a jolt of adrenaline runs down her spine. “There,” she hisses.

Jeff spins around, one hand on her shoulder so she knows where he is without having to shift her gaze. “Three,” she says. “You were right.”

The Rabbits shamble through the trees, like zombies but infinitely more terrifying for the glint of all-too-human intelligence in their eyes. They look human, but not really. They look monstrous, but not really. She can see the humanity in them, the people they used to be before Habit took them and twisted them into something else, and that hurts more than any gash or cut they could give her.

They sniff around with their caved-in noses like animals, trying to catch their signature. They growl and mutter amongst themselves, cadence halfway between people talking and creatures snapping at each other.

“Do you want to rush them?” Jeff says.

Steph rolls her eyes at him. “We rushed a group of them last time and you ended up in a tourniquet because one of them snapped at you on reflex and nearly took your finger off,” she whispers. “I ended up having to take out like three!”

“It was two,” he grumbles, but he defers to her.

They circle up to them, fingers tight on their respective weapons. Jeff catches her eye and she angles herself so moonlight just barely hits her face. She mouths out numbers. _Three, two, one_ —like shadows in a well-rehearsed ballet, they separate and move in.

As tired as she is, satisfaction thrills through her veins at the first solid hit of her hatchet in flesh. The Rabbit stumbles back and hisses at her open-mouthed, feral. She hisses back.

Steph gives herself over to the complete mindlessness of fighting. With every _thunk_ of the blade biting into half-rotted flesh and bone, a little more tension leaves her.

A narrow swipe ruffles her hair and she ducks and spins, aiming for ankles. With a wet tearing noise, Jeff yanks his bat out of a Rabbit’s face and swings at the one heading for her, putting the force of his entire body into the hit. The Rabbit stumbles towards her, twisted clawed fingers reaching for her, and she brings the hatchet up in an uppercut, splitting it open from gut to throat. She steps aside and lets the flailing body fall past her, keeping an eye on it to make sure it hits the ground and doesn’t move again.

“Steph!” Jeff yells behind her.

She whips around and in one fluid motion, throws the hatchet at the Rabbit that got Jeff pinned down. It spins head over handle for a moment that seems to stretch on forever, then embeds itself in the Rabbit’s skull. Its teeth continue gnashing for a heartbeat longer, then it collapses .

Jeff pushes the corpse off of him with a grimace and climbs to his feet. “Thanks,” he says.

She acknowledges him with a nod. “I got you,” she says. “Think there’ll be any others?”

Jeff squints up at the moon—about three-quarters of the way through the sky. “Nah,” he says. “Might as well just head back.”

She nods again and wipes off the blade of the hatchet on the grass. She goes through and checks each corpse for a pulse—they already seem to be rotting, melting into the earth as if they were despawning in a video game. “Are you hurt?”

She hears shuffling sounds as he pats himself down, then, “No, just a few rips and tears in my shirt. You?”

Steph stands up again and dusts herself off. “Nope. Not a scratch.”

Jeff shakes off the worst of the gore from his bat and pulls her into a one-armed hug. “Nice,” he says. “That was a pretty good fight for our first one back.”

She smiles. “I count no wounds and a quick fight as a win,” she says. “In a battle if not the whole war.”

They start making their way back through the forest, not letting their caution looking out for more Rabbits get in the way of bantering and bickering like the kids they used to be.

“This is the last time I’m using this bat,” Jeff complains. “Gets stuck too easy when I swing it. It’s a pain to clean, too.”

“Got reach, though,” Steph says. She ducks under the overhang of the shack’s roof and grabs a clean rag to wipe down the hatchet blade properly. “And weight.”

“That’s true.” Jeff sits down beside her and begins the unenviable task of picking dead Rabbit off of the nail heads before it dries on and dulls the bit.

“Jeff,” she says.

Jeff looks up. “Mmm?”

“I’m gonna be up for a bit,” says Steph. “I can take this watch, if you want.”

Jeff puts down the bat and looks at her. His eyes are full of understanding that hurts too much to acknowledge. Like pulling off a bandage to check how the wound is healing, only the scab has stuck to the cloth and it hurts. “What?” she says, even though she knows full well what he is seeing.

“Do you want to be alone?” he asks quietly. “Or do you want someone with you?”

Her hands shake a little and she carefully puts down the hatchet before it clatters to the floor. She takes a deep breath. “I don’t want to be alone,” she whispers. “I don’t. I keep thinking—I keep thinking—”

His arms wrap around her, squeezing tight, and he breathes overexaggerated against her chest. She struggles to match his pace and buries her face in the crook of his neck.

“I can stay up with you,” his voice rumbles beneath his ribs. “You don’t have to be alone tonight.”

She nods, gasping for breath. “I’d like that,” she chokes out. “Please.”

He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t ask anything of her. He only rubs circles into her back, the way she used to do for him when he would wake up screaming from a nightmare .

They stay up together and watch the sun slowly rise. Neither of them say anything about it. They’re beyond words, now. Lifetime after lifetime spent together will do that.

* * *

“I had to bring your brother back here for a bit,” her dad says one day. He says this nonchalantly, as if he’d just popped out for a smoke.

Jeff stares at him until James notices. “What?” he says around the cigar clenched in his teeth.

_Cigar’s not even lit,_ Steph notices offhandedly. _Comfort behavior_. _Mom would kill him._ She feels separate from herself at the mention of their missing brothers, floating above her body and observing

“Which one?” Jeff almost shouts. “Who did you see?”

“Calm down, son,” says James. “Vinnie.”

Jeff is almost beside himself with frustration. Steph is filled with some sick mix of relief and disappointment. “How is he?” he begs. “What is he doing? Was he hurt? Is he okay?”

James fusses with the lighter until it catches the butt of the cigar. “He’s fine,” he says. “A bit shaken, but fine. Habit seems to be keeping him around. Wants a cameraman.”

Jeff runs his hands through his hair. “Christ,” he groans. “Vin. . .”

“The Tall Guy was breathing down his neck, but I took care of him.” He pats the holster at his side. “Let him catch his breath here for a bit, told him we were holding down the fort here, then gave him a few warnings and brought him back.”

“Was he. . . okay?” Jeff asks. “Like. . . was he okay?”

James shrugged. “Vinnie’s always been good at sucking it up and keeping on going, ever since he was a kid. He looked shaken, but he’s a smart kid. I think he’s fine for now. Or as fine as any of us could be right now.”

“How much time has passed?” Steph is surprised at how steady her voice is. She’s made it through the past few weeks (months? years? she has no way of knowing) by thinking about the last iteration’s ending as little as possible—like a wound, leaving it alone until the scar forms over it.

James shakes his head. “Couldn’t tell. A few months, maybe? He looked tired.”

“What did you tell him?” Steph presses. “Does he remember what he’s supposed to be doing?”

James twists his mouth. “Steph,” he says gently. “You of all people should know that it’s hard to remember what’s true and what’s not when you’re in an iteration.”

She looks down and away, face suddenly hot. All of a sudden, she is twelve again, being scolded for scribbling on the walls.

“I told him what I could without freaking him out,” says the doctor. “Let him know that even though we might not be able to do much, there’s people on his side back here. Told him not to trust Habit, even though historically that hasn’t worked out.”

Jeff nods and worries at a curl. “Jesus,” he says. “I have a really bad feeling about this one, guys.”

“I know, son.” James takes a deep breath. “I do too. Habit’s got him in deep.”

“Is there—there has to be _something_ we can do,” Jeff says.

Steph looks up. “Can we send them something? Trigger a memory?” she says. “We’ve planted memory triggers before and it worked—those hidden videos? Remember?” She looks at Jeff. “We watched two seconds of those and it triggered an entire past-iteration memory.”

“That’s a good point, Steph.” Her father furrows his brow. “Let me think about this. Let me check the storage locker, see if there’s anything important in there.”

“If he can get to Fairmount, find the North Star —”

“Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves,” says James. “Hope can hurt critical thinking, we all know this lesson by now. Let’s take it one step at a time—let me look through some old resources and I’ll see what I can find.”

Jeff looks like he wants to say something, but shuts his mouth instead and just nods.

“If you find anything—” Steph begins.

“I’ll tell you two.” James smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes. He looks weary. “I promise.”

She nods. That’s all she can ask for, at this point.

“I have to go,” James says. “Someone in Florida just saw something they shouldn’t have. I’ll be back.”

“Stay safe,” says Jeff automatically.

James smiles—a real one this time—and turns to go. Reality shudders, and he is gone.

Steph and Jeff look at each other.

“ _Fuck_ ,” says Jeff, heartfelt.

“Fuck,” agrees Steph.

They sit there, unable to even contact their missing family members, and try to will the next iteration closer to them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on Tumblr @a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com! Buckle up because this is going to be a wild ride!


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> People come and go so infrequently in the Ark that when both new and old faces alike enter, it's a shock. [CW for dissociation, panic attack]
> 
> Edit 9/13/20: This was written before the allegations against Adam Rosner came out--there is substantial mentions of TribeTwelve canon in this chapter. Be mindful of what you read and what may trigger you.

Steph is sharpening her knife one night, for lack of a better activity to do, when something in the air _shifts_. Reality shifts and tears like someone new is entering the Ark but—Steph focuses on the new person and can’t seem to place them. They feel like—like? Like the deep bruised purple of tired undereyes, the decisive click of a mouse and the powdery bitterness of painkillers. She frowns. _This has never happened before_.

“Jeff,” she says, but he doesn’t wake up. She puts aside her knife and shakes him. “Jeff!”

He leaps alert, shaking curls out of his eyes. “What! What! Did they get through again?”

“No, sit down,” she says. “Someone. . . new is here.”

“Someone new?”

She gestures wordlessly—even after countless iterations they still don’t have words for the way this place changes your senses—and he frowns, focusing in. “What—who _is_ that?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says, and sets aside her knife. “Should we go find out?”

“It’s still dark. And it feels far away,” he says, frowning at the window. “Might be risky.”

Steph grins at him. “I’m bored,” she says lightly. “I know you are too. And this knife is sharp.”

Jeff sighs. “I always thought you and Evan were too similar for your own good,” he says. But he picks up his baseball bat and hefts it over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They move away from the moon, rising eerily above them. They follow the weird soul-signature, moving slowly and quietly. As they reach the invisible boundary her shoulders creep up and her hair stands on end—pushing through it is like all the bad parts of ASMR, like fingers crawling up her spine and into her hair.

They don’t go out here often. In the Garden, they at least know that they can depend on rules they know—things are weird in the Garden, sure, but they know it. Outside. . . that’s Habit’s range. They try not to go out there if they can’t help it.

God, Steph hates nights in the woods. Every fucking twig she steps on snaps like she’s about to get caught by Freddy fucking Krueger. Jeff at least seems comfortable for whatever reason, swinging his baseball bat around like he’s on a walk in the park.

“Thought you wanted to check it out,” says the dipshit himself.

She snarls at him and grips her knife tighter. “Get fucked,” she says

He fucking _wriggles_ at her and opens his mouth to say something quippy and cute and that’s when _something_ crashes into them and falls to the ground.

Jeff shouts and Steph flips her knife around in her hand, leveling the point at the stranger. “Stay there,” she warns.

The stranger rolls their shoulders and pushes up off the ground. Something’s wrong, and Steph can’t put her finger on it until she tries feeling the stranger out. They have no signature. None at all. Like she’s standing next to a black hole.

They turn around. Glasses flash—even though there’s no light this deep in the forest. They grin, and light drips off their teeth like drool. “I don’t think we’ve met,” says the stranger. His voice warps and deepens and splits into a wicked laugh.

Steph and Jeff share a glance. They come to a conclusion without saying a word.

Jeff hits the stranger hard with his baseball bat and the two of them take off in a dead sprint, heading towards the mystery signature.

“Who the fuck was that?” Steph pants.

“No idea.” Jeff steals a look over his shoulder and speeds up. “Don’t like the looks of him, though. Got Slendy-vibes all over him.”

They catch their breath next to a bridge that looks in the nighttime gloom like it stretches off towards nowhere. “That fucking laugh,” she says, and pushes her glasses back up her nose. “Creepy.”

Jeff hums in agreement and looks out beyond the scrub they’re hiding behind. “Those glasses, though,” he says pensively. “I wonder—”

“Wait.” Steph puts a hand on his arm and he freezes. “Who’s that?”

The signature grows stronger until it buzzes in her teeth. Someone runs, holding a camcorder in their hands, past the bridge. “Is that it?” they gasp. “That’s it, that’s gotta be it.” Their breath is ragged, like they’ve been running hard for hours and hours.

“Wait a sec,” Jeff hisses. “I fucking—I _know_ him.”

“Jeff—” she says, but he’s already broke cover.

She watches from the side, just about ready to chew her fingers off in anxiety. The person doesn’t seem to be threatening—if anything, they look scared shitless. She can see thick black hair disheveled over a scared face, and fingers wrapped tight around their camera. Jeff runs up to them and speaks to them intently, familiarly.

The person looks shocked, shying back from him. Reality twists and deforms like Silly Putty and she watches as Jeff, obviously torn between speaking to the interloper and his own safety, darts back and forth before ultimately making a break for it.

As he sprints back towards her, a sickeningly familiar silhouette rises up out of the shadows and makes its loping way towards the person.

Jeff careens back towards her, leaves crushing in his wake. “Habit,” he pants, and Steph can feel her gut sink like stone. “We gotta go.”

She doesn’t wait for an explanation. She runs.

They spring pretty much headlong back till they break the barrier into the Garden. Steph throws her head back, gasping in great lungfuls of air. Jeff isn’t in much better shape behind her, leaning on his baseball bat for support.

The moment she catches her breath, she whips around towards him. “Who the fuck was that?” she hisses. “And why the _fuck_ did you let _him_ see you?”

Jeff sits heavily on the ground. “That was Noah,” he says, still panting for breath. “I can’t—I have no idea how the fuck he ended up here of all places. He was one of the guys we talked to last iteration—the Tall Man and some of his friends got him pretty tight, I think.”

“What did you tell him?” she asks. “Jesus, Jeff, I can’t believe you let him catch a glimpse of you.”

“It’s fine, Steph, he won’t come after us if he’s too busy fucking with Noah.” He stares absentmindedly at the woods through the boundary, thinking. “I told him to kill himself.”

“Jeff!” He startles at her tone and she stares at him, aghast. “What the _fuck_?”

“Not in a mean way,” he says defensively. “I think he’s in an iteration too. I’ve seen some of his videos and I have some theories.”

“So you told him to _kill himself?_ ”

“He fucked it up!” Jeff protests. “We know cutting the camera helps shake attention already and no one in an iteration would _ever_ come here—we’re the only ones who are supposed to be here. He’s better off just getting out of Habit’s influence and starting over.”

“You don’t know if that’s how his iterations work, though, Jeff.” Steph offers him a hand. He grabs it and pulls himself back up. “Habit doesn’t just bring people here. He must have been brought here by someone else.”

“Aw, fuck,” says Jeff. “Let’s hope he doesn’t take it to heart.”

“He looked scared shitless,” she says, and nudges him a little. “Probably should’ve said hi or something first.”

Jeff pushes her and she almost trips, laughing. “Shut up,” he says, but he smiles a bit. “Let’s just go back to the shelter.”

They continue through the woods, tripping over roots and catching each other in turn. Miles away, Noah Maxwell comes face to face with every single one of humanity’s bad Habits, and survives.

* * *

One day, James Corenthal steps back into the Garden and calls their names. Steph, half a mile away, grabs her hatchet and starts running. She had drifted away from their home base over the last few days, had left Jeff to work with their dad to figure out what their next steps were and taken some time to just wander around.

It was nice—she didn’t have to think about anything but living day to day, re-exploring the boundaries of the Garden, fending off whatever creatures break through the wall, and processing, just like every single therapist she’d had throughout her iterations called it.

It was good. It was needed. She just felt a little bad leaving Jeff to be the sole sounding board as their dad tried to anticipate Habit’s next move.

She arrives at the shack to see James pacing back and forth, muttering to himself. “Where’s your brother?” he says as she stumbles to a halt.

“I don’t know?” she says. “Last time I saw him he was mucking around with the camera you brought back last time.”

“Jeff!” he calls again. “We have to go _now!_ ”

“What’s going on?” she asks as they wait for the last of them to show up. “What’s the plan now?’

Jeff arrives, camera in hand, and the doctor sketches out his plan in the dirt.

“Every now and then,” James explains, “the lines blur. Like what happens in the Garden at night, but on a much larger scale. The entire Ark gets wobbly, and the lines blur. You know this already, Jeff.” He looks directly at Jeff, who looks all of a sudden very interested in the camera he is holding. “I’ve seen the hidden videos—those may have been Habit’s uploads but you’ve been taking the footage, haven’t you?”

Jeff mumbles.

“Don’t worry about it, son, it might end up helping us in the end.” He sketches a rough X in the dirt, and a lopsided circle a handslength away. “Here—” he points to the wobbly circle—“is the Garden. We know its patterns pretty well—every few days we can expect an attack, but there’s a defined boundary keeping us safe. We can come in and usually nothing else comes with us.”

“On the other hand—” he draws a dashed line from the circle-Garden to the X, and squiggles a border around it encompassing both of them—“the Ark itself as a whole is weirder. It relies more on Habit’s rules—which is to say chaos, most of the time. You four can come in when you die, and I can dip in and out of this space and time pretty much at will by now. And I guess we know now that Habit can even bring people in. But not much can go out, unless you reiterate. But Jeff, you already know that certain things can get through to the other side, right?”

“Only on certain days,” Jeff says. “Sometimes I can send footage out, sometimes I can’t. I got a clip from last iteration out—you remember, the one where it was me, Vinnie, and Evan while you and Steph were somewhere else? That one got out, but I couldn’t send anything substantial.”

James nods. “Every three days, the boundaries between the two planes shift. I’m pretty sure just by sheer fluke, you must have sent out that footage during a point of flux. I think if we can get some info through to Vince on the other side, it would help immensely.”

Steph crouches down and stares at the rough sketch he planned out. “How will we get through to him?” she asks. “Jeff can barely get footage to the other side—what would we send that wouldn’t crowd the bandwidth?

“The tapes,” James says. “Sent through the radio tower.”

“The radio tower?” Jeff taps the X on the drawing. “That supposed to be this? I didn’t even know it was functional—I thought it was just there for looks.”

“It is,” James confirms. “Tested it out when I brought Vinnie back here last time. It amplifies the signal, somehow. If you can get last iteration’s tapes out through that tower—”

“Audio is easier than video,” Steph breathes. “There’s more than three hours worth but even so—”

James nods. “Exactly. We just need to figure out how to get there without getting caught.”

“That’s in Habit’s territory.” Steph wants to be cautious, approach this from every angle, but even though hope she knows is a mistake, she can’t help but feel it rise. “We need to be quick. All three of us, so we can watch each other’s backs.”

“You have the tapes?” James asks.

Jeff nods. “Every piece of documentation from the past iterations are in the back of the shack, under the weapons. Most of the documents are out, but the tapes aren’t in play yet.”

“Perfect,” says James. “We can rip the audio and get it out as quickly as possible. If Habit knows there’s a weak spot between the Ark and the real world, God knows what he’ll do with that information. But if we can send it out, then get back here and prepare for the final showdown. . .”

“I really want this one to be the last,” Jeff says. He looks older than his perpetual twenties-ish face. None of them know what lies beyond the iteration cycle, but at this point all of them would love to find out.

“Me too, son,” James says. “Me too.” He scrubs at his face, tired. “We go tomorrow. Rest up tonight—it’ll be a long day.”

She stands. “Jeff,” she says. “I’ll grab the tapes if you want to get the audio files ready to drop?”

“Sure.” Her brother heaves himself up wearily. “I want this to end,” he says quietly. “I want this to end so bad.”

James watches the two of them, and the look on his face is no longer that of a doctor and leader, but that of a father who watches his children suffer over and over again and can only rarely intervene. “Come here, you two,” he says gruffly.

Steph steps over the rough drawings on the floor and wraps her arms around him. Jeff is next to her, and she feels the weight of her father’s hand on her head, heavy and comforting. She can feel Jeff shaking beside her until the steady pressure of their father’s embrace drives it out.

“You are so brave,” James Corenthal tells his children. His voice is tight. “You kids are so brave. God bless you. I love you so much.”

Her throat is too tight to say it back, but she thinks he knows already.

* * *

The next day, Jeff closes the shitty old laptop he edits footage on and nods at her. “That’s as clear as I can get it,” he says. “The tapes aren’t great quality, of course, but all the salvageable audio is up.”

“Nice.” Steph helps him up and squeezes his hand. “Let’s let Dad know.”

The hike there isn’t terrible—in broad daylight, it’s harder to be scared of nightmares. It almost has a picnic-esque attitude about it—for a moment she can allow herself to enjoy the sun on her skin and the smell of the grass, and her father and brother bantering behind her as they walk.

Then something _shifts_ and Steph stops dead in her tracks. “What was that?”

Her brother steps up behind her and she can see his hand creep to his pocket where the phone is. “Does he know?” he whispers. “Does he know we’re here?”

“Keep going,” their father says. “We’ve come too far at this point. I have my gun, and I know both you and Steph have multiple weapons squirreled away. If we turn back now we’ll waste sunlight.”

Without looking at him, she grabs for Jeff’s hand and holds it tight. Ever since they were kids, sharing a cramped stuffy room in the Fairmount Children’s Home, physical contact had been grounding for him. He grips her hand tight and keeps holding on, even though by this time her palm had gone all weird and sweaty. “I think someone’s here,” he says.

Reality shifts and suddenly someone is in front of them, sitting on the worn concrete slab nearly covered by the grass.

Steph reels as their signature hits her—the smell of a campfire, sunlight glinting off of a blade, a hand against hers—and her hands fly up to cover her mouth. She wheezes in shock, her body convulses in an effort to get away from this new trick Habit has decided to play on her.

_Evan_.

Her companion, her protector, her love—part of her longs to go to him, wrap an arm around his shoulders but the rest of her—

_again, she is paralyzed on the bed, watching familiar arms holding_ her _baby, her child, her own—she can’t shut her own ears to the sound of chewing, it’s so loud and her baby’s corpse is mangled—_

When she comes to again she is running _hard_ , her lungs raw from the air she’s heaving in between sobs. She forces herself to a stop too quickly and her momentum sends her sprawling on her hands and knees as if she’d been pushed.

_She thought she was better. She really thought—_

But this is like salt being spat into a raw wound.

She doesn’t know how long it takes until her father finds her. She is sitting quietly under a bush, hands in a death grip around her hatchet, breathing in tiny little sips of air like a rabbit.

“Stephie,” he says gently, like she’s a scared little kid again. “Stephie, it’s me. Do you recognize me?”

She is not in her body. She is somewhere else, floating above her body, and she watches the girl cowering below her with dispassionate eyes. She doesn’t move. It’s not important.

“Stephie,” James Corenthal says again. He has frozen where he is, one hand reached out towards her like a peace offering. “Please. It’s just me. Your dad. It’s okay, sweetheart, I promise.”

“Hh—” She can feel herself being drawn back down into her body like smoke sucked into lungs. She can’t control her hands. She can’t control her breathing. She is sitting in her body and her arms are pieces of clay weighing her down.

“It’s okay.” Her father’s voice is familiar now and she clings to it like a lifeline. “It’s okay, Stephie, I’m here. Can you let go of the axe, sweetheart?”

She shudders. She lets the hatchet fall from her fingers. It bounces on the ground and James slowly takes it and puts it to the side. She whimpers and she wants to reach for her weapon, her safety, but her hands are pieces of wood left uncarved.

Her father moves into her space slowly, like a man approaching a wounded animal. His hands are widespread and empty, unthreatening. Slowly, he crawls under the bush to sit next to her. He puts his heavy leather coat around her shoulders and the weight of it grounds her in her body.

Slowly, too slowly, her breathing steadies. She focuses on moving her pinkie, and then her hands. Everything comes back in a rush after that and she shudders uncontrollably.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. What happened? What did I miss?”

“It’s okay,” James says. “Everything is okay. We sent the files. Everyone is fine.”

“Why was—was that—I—”

“Breathe,” he says. His voice is steady, grey, soothing. “Yes, that was Evan.”

A vise clamps around her lungs.

“Hm,” says James. “We don’t exactly know how he got here or why, but he helped Jeff send the files out. Seems Habit loosened its grip on him for a bit. He seemed. . . fine. Confused, a little, but fine. Ready to do what he could to help.”

Steph chokes for breath. She can almost feel the black tar seeping up through her lungs, pouring from her eyes.

Her father rubs her back, the sensation dulled oddly through the leather. “Stephie,” he says quietly. “Do you have anything you need to get off your chest?”

She lets out a shuddering breath and laughs a little. “Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do.”

The story of this iteration comes out piece by piece, painfully, like sutures being snipped and pulled from the skin.

Her father sits and listens through the whole thing, saying not a single word but his eyes growing damper and damper as she speaks.

At the end of it, she is shaking with exhaustion and pent-up stress with nowhere to put it. She feels tired down to her bones, like she had fought off a fever and was left sweaty and boneless in the aftermath.

James Corenthal pulls his daughter into a tight, tight hug, as if he could protect her from the trauma locked in her own brain. “I’m sorry,” he breathes into her ear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

She burrows her head into his chest and shakes.

“God,” he says. “God help and forgive me, I cannot protect my children. Lord God,” he says, and presses his lips to the crown of her head. “I’m sorry.”

His hand moves in steady circles over her back. She keeps breathing.

Night has fallen around them. Jeff and Evan must be worried about them by now.

“Stephie,” he says.

She looks up at him.

“Can you walk, sweetheart?”

She thinks for a bit, then nods.

“I’m going to help you up, all right?” he says. “Then I’m going to give you your hatchet back, and we’re going to go find your brother.”

_Brother?_ she mouths, looking up at him.

“Evan disappeared when the light started to go,” he says. “I left Jeff with the phone at the tower. We should find him.”

She follows him through the woods, the light of the sun at dusk just treacherously bright enough for them to see by. Her hands worry at the handle of the hatchet, fingernails tracing the old combat grooves carved into the wood.

As they break the treeline, she can see Jeff, alone, pacing a small circle in the grass and glancing nervously up at the sky. When he sees them, his shoulders slump in relief and he starts making his way toward them.

Just out of the shadow of the trees, James stops and grabs her shoulder, forcing her to stop with him. “Steph,” he says, and his voice carries the determination and courage she’d needed so badly. “Hoping hurts. I know it does, I know it hurts and I hurt every single time I see you four go out into the world again. But I really believe that the next one we’ll get it. We came _so_ close this time. We know what to do now. We can do this.”

She looks at him and feels so brittle she could snap.

“It hurts,” she whispers.

“I know, sweetheart. Let me hope for you. We can finish this.” He smiles at her and abruptly she wants to cry again—tears of overwhelming love for her father, who keeps going, who has the strength to put a light at the end of a tunnel.

“Let’s get your brother and get back to the shelter,” he says. “I have a feeling we’ve got a long night ahead of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me @a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com and also someone please link me how to insert html links and images into ao3 luv u all


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The ouroboros snake takes another bite.

Things go wrong.

Terribly wrong.

Steph hangs off to the side as her father punches in a phone number. “C’mon,” he mutters. “Will you answer, man? C’mon! C’mon!”

Vinnie picks up, but from the one-sided conversation she can pick up, it doesn’t go well. She raises her eyebrows as he tosses the phone to the ground in disappointment. “That bad, huh?” she says.

“Your brother,” James says, “bless his soul, loves thinking he knows what is best.” He runs his hand through his hair, frustrated, and with a resigned sigh stoops to pick up his phone. “He’s going to try to pull the wool over Habit’s eyes. We’ve tried this before and it’s _never_ worked. He needs to scrap it and just end the iteration so we can go again.”

“He needs to come home,” Steph agrees, and idly flips her hatchet in her hand. “Both of them do.”

“The tapes sent in the wrong order, he didn’t get the right tape in time—Habit must have interfered with the sending . .”

“He got the North Star, though,” Steph says. “Without Habit’s help. Even though he didn’t get the right tape, that counts for something.”

“If only he would _listen_ to us and use it on the right person.”

“We’re in the endgame either way.” She turns to walk down the hiking trail back to their shelter and after a few beats she hears her dad’s footsteps coming after her. “Just a matter of time before we get to restart.”

Her father’s words are almost drowned out by the crunching of their feet over dry leaves. “I just wish it wouldn’t hurt so much.”

* * *

Things happen incredibly fast after that.

Steph is sitting in the field, getting some sun with their weapons stash and using the light to pick out the bits of blood and muck that Jeff somehow didn’t clean out. She swears, he’s blind when it comes to weapon upkeep.

The world around her shimmers, and resolidifies.

She picks her head up from the blade she is obsessively polishing and sharpening and looks around. _Evan_.

But if Evan is dead, then. . . ?

Vinnie can’t be far off.

Steph takes her time putting the weapons away. She gives the knife she was working on one last polish, then sets that one aside as well, placed neatly in the back of the shack. She picks up her hatchet and sets off to where her brother—brothers—are.

She finds Evan first, before her brother and father get there. She sits down next to him, lying slumped in the grass, and looks up at the sky. While she waits for him to wake up, she breathes out, slowly, and in again. She can let this go. She is more than the iterations she has lived through.

When he opens her eyes, she is there. She looks over at him, then back up at the sky. It’s a little after what passes for noon here, and the sky is searingly blue.

“Hey,” she says.

“Steph,” he gasps. “Steph.”

She smiles a little, and pulls him up into a hug. “Was getting bored before you decided to show up,” she jokes lightly. “About time.”

“ _Steph_ ,” he says a third time. “I’m sorry, Steph, I’m so sorry, it made me and I felt every bit of it—”

“Let it go,” she tells him. “Let it go. It’s done.”

He shudders against her. “I’m sorry,” he whispers again. “Habit made me do it.”

She kisses his temple. “I know.”

She has found that, now that she has seen him again for the first time in a small eternity, letting the past go is as easy as blinking.

They stay like that until reality hums again. The last one of them has made it to the Ark.

She shakes him gently. “Let’s go get Vinnie,” she says quietly.

The deep, bruised circles under Evan’s eyes are lightening already. He stands up first, on legs that do not shake, and offers her a hand.

Steph pulls herself up and together, they walk towards the tree.

They meet Jeff and their father, heading up the hill. They stop for more hugs, more reassurances that their sacrificial lamb was not to blame and that the next time around will be better. Jeff keeps a hand on Evan’s shoulder the entire rest of the walk. Their father brings up the back, keeping an eye on the three of them as they go to find their missing piece.

They find Vinnie, leaning against the tree. His hand is up against his neck, and Evan sucks in a pained breath at the sight. Steph squeezes his hand. “He’ll be okay,” she whispers.

Evan doesn’t say a word, but he nods.

A few paces away lies a camcorder, abandoned in the grass. Following some instinct she can’t explain, Steph picks it up. It’s still recording. She focuses in on her brothers and father as Vinnie wakes up.

“You did what you thought was right,” James tells Vinnie gently, still disoriented from the last few hectic minutes of his life.

Steph smiles at her brother, finally back. “What do you want to do with this?” She nods towards the camera.

Vinnie’s face shifts through undeterminable emotions. “We don’t need it,” he tells her.

“You sure?”

He nods. “Yep.

“Okay.” She sets the camera down on the roots of the tree. She runs to catch up with her family, throwing an arm around Vinnie’s shoulders as they walk away.

The camera, behind them, goes black.

* * *

After Vinnie and Evan have recuperated somewhat, got their feet under themselves and their minds back in order, they sit down as a family and have something of a war council.

“So!” James claps his hands, bringing everyone to attention. “What worked and what didn’t?”

“Internet helped,” Jeff says. “Crowdsourcing puzzle-solving. Saved a shit-ton of time even if half of them thought it was a joke.”

“Also widened the Tall Man and Habit’s range, though,” Vinnie says. “We saw what happened to every single person that tried to help in the Trials. We _know_ what happened to them, we deal with it every night we get an attack.”

“But wouldn’t that have happened anyways?” The words are heavy on Steph’s tongue, but she keeps going anyways. “It’s harsh to say, but wouldn’t they have died either way? Habit gets bored with us, wanders off to pick off some people until it gets bored of _that_ , comes back to us—this is awful but they might as well die trying to put an end to this.”

Evan’s mouth twists. “I agree with Steph,” he says. “Look I—I don’t even think we can kill Habit, not really. Honestly, I think the best we can hope for is killing it and maybe, I dunno, having less war crimes and serial killers for a century max. It’s not going to _stay_ dead. It’s all of humanity’s sins combined. But if a few people die—and I’m including us,” he hurries to say. “We’ve all bit the dust throughout every single iteration and that’s just how it goes, we can’t change that. But if a few people die—if it means getting ride of _every single one of humanity’s bad habits_ ,even for a few years—maybe a century if we’re really lucky—isn’t it worth it?”

“That’s a fair point,” Vinnie concedes. “Pull resources from the internet. We can try to put disclaimers when shit gets real? I doubt anyone will pay attention—that’s what we tried to do last time—”

“’Stop watching’,” Jeff says. “I remember.”

“Okay,” says James. “Crowdsourcing Internet help. I also think we should push someone to find the North Star as soon as possible—the quicker we get that information, the quicker we will have an actual possible weapon. It’ll be harder, since Habit knows now that we don’t need to rely on it to get that information, but it’s worth a try.”

“This _was_ the closest we’ve ever gotten, though,” Evan says. “What can we change?”

“Not fucking—trying to pull one over Habit, for one.” Vinnie’s face darkens. “Stupid.”

“You didn’t know,” Jeff says. “But yeah.”

“Not wasting time fucking around with the Rake,” says Steph. “That wasted time. It’s just there on the periphery—the dog isn’t allowed to actually kill us, just wear us out. Might as well just keep moving.”

“That’s a good point,” the doctor says. “Now, what if we. . .”

The planning doesn’t take a single day. Not even a few days. None of them know how long they have until the next cycle starts, so they make the most of the time they have together.

It’s not like planning things out ensures that those plans would be remembered in the next iteration, but with a bit of trial and error they’ve worked out that they can _implant_ memories and ideas in their iteration-selves’ heads—like the memories of them being taken by the Man to Memory Town, PA, or Vinnie finding the tapes just in time to leave Habit’s domain and find the North Star. It’s far from perfect—most of the time, it doesn’t even work—but it’s better than nothing.

This past iteration was the closest they have ever come to finishing it—they had checked all of the boxes. They had found each other—there’s a reason Habit, the Man, and the Dog try to keep them apart each iteration. There is power in numbers. They had found allies, other people that bore the same burden and could offer help. Most crucially, they had found the North Star, the one thing that could actually touch Habit—only to have it slip through their fingers.

If they could follow this iteration as closely as possible, seed thoughts that poke their iterations down the right road _(I should move north/I should record this/What is in these tapes?/I think we can trust each other)_ , they might— _might_ —be able to end this. All of it. For good.

“Have we come to a consensus?” James asks, an immeasurable amount of time later. He’s met with nods and Jeff looks up.

“Let me reiterate out loud, just to get it clear?” He looks up and James nods at him.

“Go ahead, son,” he says.

“So, overall we’re just going to follow the last iteration as closely as possible.” He looks around at their small circle of five. “Try to find each other, then stick together for as long as possible. The longer even one of us lives, the better our chances. We find each other, then you—” he points to their father—“start dropping clues before Habit finds us again. We know nothing concrete would work, it’s not like you can give us the whole North Star symbol or anything—it’ll just be a repeat of the hidden videos. Just small stuff, stuff that’ll trigger iteration memories, help us prepare to fight and figure out what’s happening. When we’ve prepped enough, whoever’s back here will drop the tapes again, we head back to Fairmount, get the North Star, and dick around with Habit until we stick it with a knife or a gun or whatever we got.”

He looks up at everyone again. “That right?”

“Close enough,” James says. “Historically, we seem to over-plan anyways so loose outlines will probably be best.” He looks around at his children, all holding weariness older and heavier than their twenty-odd years.

“We were so close to ending it last time,” he says slowly. “This time.”

Vinnie looks up at him. “This time,” he says quietly. It’s impossible to tell if that is bitterness in his voice, or simply exhaustion.

Evan slumps over like a bored kid and lands with his head in Jeff’s lap. He reaches up and bats at his face, half-teasing, half-bored. Without even looking, Jeff bats his hand away and Evan pouts. “Who wants to spar?” he asks. “We have a plan. I’m bored. We might as well start killing time till the next iteration starts.”

“I’m down,” Steph says. She might as well stay sharp, and Evan’s right—it’s not like there’s anything else to do.

“Me too,” says Jeff.

James looks at them fondly. “I remember when you guys would play-fight with sticks in the backyard,” he says. “Well, we’re not going to get anything else done. You all go ahead, then.”

The days pass. She doesn’t know how much time passes on the other side of the veil—could be a few days, could be a few decades. It’s not important—she spends her time with her family, anyways.

Each and every one of them misses Maryann. She had a tempering effect on her father, knew when to be quiet and when to push when any of them had a relapse. None of them mention her, growing old alone on the other side of the veil. They have all learned to let sleeping dogs lie.

One day, Steph corners Jeff alone and asks him about the time he visited her down south. “How was she?” she asked. “Did she recognize you?”

“She definitely recognized me,” he said. “She looked like she saw a ghost, which—” his mouth twists bitterly—“isn’t that inaccurate, I guess. She drove me away pretty quickly.”

“Was she well?” she presses. “She wasn’t hurt or sick or anything?”

“No,” he says. “She was safe, nothing or no one had followed her when she went into hiding. The next time I tried to find her, she was gone. No trace of anything. She probably went deeper into hiding.”

Steph nods slowly. “Smart,” she says.

Jeff looks at his hands. “She looked. . . old,” he says quietly. “Tired.”

Steph carefully puts an arm around his shoulder. “I miss her,” she whispers.

Jeff lets out a long, shuddery breath. “Me too,” he says.

Steph and Vinnie are up one night, shooting the shit and keeping watch while the others nap, when Vinnie freezes mid-sentence.

“What?” she asks. She’s already alert, looking around, trying to detect any unfamiliar signatures.

“Ah, fuck,” Vinnie says. “Get the other ones ready. Here we go.”

It takes a beat too long for it to sink in, and by the time she’s roused the others Vinnie has gone, leaving only an after-impression of his signature in his wake.

Jeff sits up, bleary but alert. “Mamma mia,” he says. His voice is croaky. “Here we go again.”

Jeff goes next a few days later, blipping out of existence between one swing of his bat and another. Steph has to pick up the slack in the blink of an eye, putting all of her weight behind her hunting knife and crushing through a Rabbit’s ribcage before it can snap at her face. She pushes the limp body off of her, panting, and looks to Evan. She catches his gaze right before he slits a Rabbit’s throat. He gets caught in the arterial spray and he spits, disgusted.

“Fuck, I _hate_ when they do that,” he says and wipes his face off. He only succeeds in smearing blood into his hair and Steph quirks her lips in a smile.

“Maybe if you stopped going for the throat you’d have better luck,” she says.

“Just the two of us now, huh?” he says.

“Looks like it.”

From prior experience, she knows that it’s only a matter of time till Evan, and then she, gets sent to reiterate again. In a perverse way, she’s excited for it—it’s one thing to get some time to recover from the last cycle and see her family (or most of her family) again. It’s another thing entirely to be kept in limbo, slave to the near-nonexistent passage of time in the hopes that something, this time, will change.

She spends her remaining days with Evan, and her father when he’s there. They spend their time talking about everything, about nothing. Evan had always, always been the one to poke her, to talk to her even if she never talked back—he was always the one who, after a relapse, would be the first to come into her room and sit down and start chattering away about whatever was on his mind.

She is with him when he gets pulled out of the Ark to reiterate—they are in the same field he came back to her in, his head in her lap and his fingers fiddling with a bit of grass. She can’t remember what he was talking about—music he listened to last iteration, or shitty jokes he came up with and tried to get her to laugh at. She only remembers when he stopped talking, and the way his fingers stilled.

“Oh,” he says quietly. “No matter how many times we go around, I keep forgetting how weird it feels.”

She looks down at him, letting the worry and fear she feels pour out through her eyes.

“Don’t worry, Steph,” says Evan. He reaches up to push a stray bit of hair out of her eyes. “You always worry too much. I’ll see you on the other side, yeah?”

She swallows. “Yeah,” she says. Her voice is rough. “Yeah, I will. Don’t do anything stupid.”

He grins at her, opens his mouth to speak—and he is gone. And Steph is alone again.

She wants to scream, so she does. Her voice sounds small in the vast and silent expanse of the field.

That night, James comes back. He sits up with her, as tired as he must be, and lets her cry on his shoulder. Even though the grey in his stubble multiplies by the day, his arm feels exactly the same way around her as it did when she was little.

“I’m scared,” she whispers. “I’m so, so scared. All the time.”

“I know,” he tells her. “But I know you are brave, too.”

She gives up on sleeping and spends her days and nights pacing, roaming the woods, staring at the boundary and picking fights with Rabbits. She practices her form, sparring with shadows in the vague hope that something, _anything_ , would carry over into the next iteration and she could _do_ something this time instead of stand by and watch her loved ones get picked off.

She’s _sick_ of being the damsel. Sick of being the person to stand by and cower as everything she loves is ripped out of her hands. She can’t do that again. She won’t.

When the iteration takes her, she is with her father, listening to him tell her stories about their childhood she’d heard hundreds of times before. She grips his hand and he stops mid-sentence. “Steph?”

“Dad,” she says. Her mind feels fuzzy, stretched between two points in space and time. “I love you. I’ll see you soon, okay? Stay safe. Be smart.”

“Steph? I love you too, sweetheart. Be strong. Be brave,” he tells her. He grips her hand tight, as if he could hold her here with him, his last child left. “I love you.”

And she is gone, gone, whirling through nothingness. She becomes nothingness—her brain is nothing, her body is nothing, she is nothing—and then resolidifies in a new time, a new place.

Stephanie Adler opens her eyes. She is seven years old and she knows with growing certainty that if she were to look out her bedroom window, she will see a tall man in a suit with no face looking back at her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> mamma mia! here we go again! here is where shit starts popping off! find me on [ tumblr ](https://a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com)!


	5. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The cycle begins anew.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before we get into the new chapter, there's some things that need to be addressed. 
> 
> If you haven’t heard the news already, some very ugly stuff came to light re: TribeTwelve and its creator, Adam Rosner. As I’m relatively new to the fandom (only started watching Slenderverse stuff maybe five months ago?), I won’t hash everything out here but I encourage you to, if you have not already, check out Twitter and Tumblr for receipts and background information.
> 
> I want to make this clear: **I do not support, condone, or seek to diminish any of his actions.** What he has done is reprehensible and my heart goes out to the victims.
> 
> I feel that it’s important that you, the reader, know that there will be TribeTwelve references throughout this fic. Again, as I’m relatively new to the fandom and honestly have very little attachment right now, _I’m able to separate the creator from the creation_. Not everyone can do that. I understand that. I can’t think of a graceful way to write around the plot necessities that require TribeTwelve references and unless I do before we get there, there _will_ be TribeTwelve content in this fic. I will keep it to the bare minimum, and will do my best to give a trigger warning in the Author’s Notes before the body of writing when a substantial interaction with TribeTwelve canon comes up.
> 
> I believe survivors. I do not support or make excuses for pedophiles. Take care of yourself and be gentle to yourself.
> 
> -Kirjavi

The Man likes her drawings.

She leaves them everywhere—scattered along the treeline behind the house, on her windowsill, even sometimes in the parks when her mom drives her and her brother to play and get their energy out.

Steph learns pretty quickly what kind of pictures the Man likes—he takes all of her pictures of trees, natural things, water. She’s getting really good at drawing the beach. He likes high tide pictures, when the water floods up past the scraggly beach grass and licks at the rocks.

She likes drawing! Her teachers in school don’t understand that the Man is her biggest fan and so she has to draw things that he likes. She can learn through the pictures he takes and the pictures he leaves what she does well—she can shade better than any of the other kids in her boring fourth-grade art class, and she already has an intuitive eye for how to trick the eye into seeing something drawn on paper as three-dimensional.

Steph doesn’t understand when the office calls her down to talk to a lady about her drawings. Why is it such a big deal that she likes drawing pictures of her friend? He’s fun to draw, anyways, standing by himself in the woods—and easy too, because she doesn’t have to work so hard drawing his face and making sure his eyes are symmetric or anything like that.

She tells all this to the lady and the only thing she gets for her troubles is a reference to see another lady. It’s not important, it just means Steph needs to be smarter about showing the Man her drawings.

The other lady—Dr. Martins—is way nicer than the lady at school. She lets her scribble and doesn’t always make her talk like the other lady.

“Who is your friend?” asks Dr. Martins one day. Steph is honestly surprised it took her so long to ask. She looks up from the shadows she’s scribbling and takes a moment to think.

“He’s. . .” She frowns, trying to put him into words. “He’s the Man. Haven’t you seen him before? He’s hard to miss.”

Dr. Martins leans forward, furrowing her brows. “I don’t think I know about him, Steph. Can you tell me more about him? What does the man look like?”

“Like this!” Steph shows her the drawing she’s working on. She’s proud of it—she’s almost got his proportions down, the way his legs stretch and the tilt of his head as he watches her and her brother play. She’s a little frustrated, though—are all adults this stupid? She’s sure she’s mentioned the Man to them before, they just don’t listen right.

Dr. Martins frowns a little. “Steph, this man doesn’t have any face. Are you sure he looks like that?”

Steph rolls her eyes at her, even though she knows it’s rude and she should be more respectful to adults. “ _Yes_ ,” she says. “The Man doesn’t have a face. Everyone knows that.”

Dr. Martins opens her mouth, then closes it, and frowns harder. “Steph,” she says. “This man—what does he do? Do you play together? Does he—does he touch you at all?”

Steph goes back to drawing in leaves on the trees. “He just watches,” she says. “From the trees. But sometimes he comes closer and talks to me.”

Dr. Martins starts scribbling stuff down on her tablet. “Like what?” she asks. “What does he tell you?”

Steph furrows her brow, thinking hard. It’s hard to put the Man into descriptions someone else would get. “He doesn’t _really_ talk,” she says slowly. “I guess he kind of? Thinks? And you think with him.”

Dr. Martins looks very worried and Steph is starting to get worried and jumpy too, like when sometimes the boys at school would laugh at her for getting scared of the woods or loud noises and she would need to go and hide somewhere before they get even louder . “What does he make you think?” she asks.

Steph shrugs. She can feel her shoulders tightening up, the urge to shrink in and be quiet getting stronger, and she picks up her pencil and scribbles viciously at the paper. “Water,” she says. “Floods. Warnings about stuff that might happen that I need to be careful about. I don’t know.” She messed up on his arms, they look disproportionate and weird and she wants to scribble all over it and throw it out. She wants to go home. “Can I go home now please?”

Dr. Martins stands up and escorts her out of her office to where her mom sits, waiting for her appointment to end. Steph sits down on the uncomfortable waiting room chair and stares at her drawing while Dr. Martins and her mom talk off to the side. She knows eavesdropping is rude but she can’t help it. She has good ears.

“—visual hallucinations, too soon for a diagnosis but I’ll send you resources—”

“—just don’t _understand_ , it’s all so much right now—”

“—similar to a case from the 70s, I’ll consult with some colleagues—”

“—just want her to be _happy_.”

Steph looks at her drawing, hard. It’s pretty good. Maybe her best one yet. The leaves on the trees are individual without being overly detailed, and the foreground-middle ground-background separation is really clear and natural. The Man looks pretty good, if not for the wonky arms. She thinks he would like this one.

By the time her mom collects her and bundles her into the car so they come home in time for dinner, she has torn the picture to shreds.

* * *

She’s learned to not talk about the Man. To the few people her age she’s told, they usually just laugh her off or make jokes—nothing to really worry about there, except the growing realization that no one will ever truly support her when she needs it. To the adults that she told—that was another story. Either they brush her off as just another kid who cried mental-health wolf, or they get considerably worried—but not about the Man. No, they get worried about _her_. Which frankly she just doesn’t need right now. Trying to make it through eighth grade in one mentally-stable piece is difficult enough.

It’s almost summer, though—which means she’s almost a high schooler, which _means_ once she places out of the boring classes and gets to take an actual decent art class, she won’t have to deal with as much of the assholes. Middle school’s like—it’s like “I hate myself, so I hate everyone around me.” And Steph knows. She gets it. But damn, it’s exhausting, and there’s only so much MCR she can listen to before she starts going crazy.

As her mom hustles her and her brother out the door in time to catch the bus, she feels the Man’s presence at the base of her skull. It feels kind of like when you know someone is watching you—like a steady pressure at that soft, vulnerable part of her head. She sneaks a quick peek before she gets on the bus—there he is, standing at the edge of the trees. Even though he doesn’t have a face, she can tell he’s looking right at her.

She hasn’t left him a picture in ages—not since elementary school. Maybe that’s what he wants? He’s been hanging around way more often than he used to—before, he would show up maybe once every few months. Now, she sees him almost every week.

“—now three children missing in Elmore County,” drones the bus radio. “Each of them are gone with no signs of a struggle, but the police are advising parents keep a closer eye on their children even so. And now, looking at today’s forecast—”

Steph leans her head against the bus window, ignoring the rattling of the tires, and watches the trees go by. She catalogues the green of leaves in summer’s first rush, the blazing blue of the sky above them, the iridescent sheen of asphalt. She ignores the Man, standing at the side of the road, tilting his head to watch the bus go by.

Halfway through the day, she gets a nosebleed. Flushing from embarrassment, she grabs a tissue from the box in the back of the classroom, waves at her teacher, and runs into the hall. The feeling of hot copper-smelling liquid sliding down the back of her throat is unbearable and she pinches hard, trying to stanch the flow without getting blood all over the hallway tiles. Blood leaks down from between her fingers, the tissue quickly growing sodden, and she whispers a curse under her breath as blood drips on white tile. She dips into the bathroom for more tissues before running to the nurse’s office so she can at least be out of the way while she makes a mess.

She manages to get out of gym for the day, which is about the only thing that goes right. Her gym teacher lets her sit outside and keep score while the class gets broken up into two soccer teams. She has just marked down the first score when a perfectly circular red droplet spatters on the paper. Steph looks up slowly. Blood oozes sickeningly down her upper lip.

The Man is standing not six feet away from her.

His face—his head—is tilted down toward her. Her head hurts, like a dull pressure, like someone put their thumbs behind her eyeballs and is slowly pushing _out_. She freezes like a deer in the headlights.

The Man tilts his head up in a blur—not like he moved quickly, but like her eyes were not meant to see him move—and looks past her, over the football field toward the school. She can feel his attention sharpen like static fuzzing in the air. Blood drips down her chin. She blinks with tearing eyes and looks to her side, where he was looking.

Smoke curls up in a lazy tendril from the school roof. From here, she can hear the first keening whoop of a siren. She feels like she’s in a dream as she stands up and yells to her teacher, ignoring her nosebleed.

The presence of the Man behind her weighs heavy. She can feel his gaze on the back of her neck.

Her teacher curses and rounds up the rest of her class, telling them to go to their designated emergency stations on the outfield. She can hear him dialing 911 and giving their information as if from underwater.

The fire spreads unnaturally quick, as if the entire school was doused in gasoline. She watches the flames roar in a daze. The static grows heavier in her ears, then releases like a can being popped open. The Man is gone.

It starts raining.

Steph gasps in air like she’s never breathed before. _Her brother is still in the school._

She screams.

Later, she’s told she tried to run back into the school, that she fought with the strength of a grown man to break free from her teacher’s arms to hurl herself through the burning door. She doesn’t remember any of that. She remembers glimpses—firefighters using axes to break through a shut door, the sobs of little kindergarteners as they file out in scared little rows.

It’s only until her brother breaks free from his homeroom group and runs to her, face streaked with smoke, that she stills. She wriggles out of her teacher’s grasp to run to him, hugging him so tight he protests. “I’m sorry,” she gasps into his ear. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

The Man started the fire. She knows it. She could tell by the way her head throbbed the moment the fire started, like the Man somehow shaped reality to set that school ablaze faster than any building should have burned. This is her fault. She brought the man here. It’s her fault.

A lot of things change after that. Almost every single student after the fire knows another who was hurt, or worse. They’re relocated to a shitty temp building while they work on reconstructing the old school. For a while, administration is a little more lenient with grades and attendance. It lasts for about a month, then they get strict again.

Steph can’t sleep for more than a handful of hours each night. She keeps reliving that moment over and over again, the way it stretched out like taffy into one long, terrible eternity. Seeing/feeling the Man behind her. The blood dripping down her face. She, too shocked to stanch the flow. And the terrible realization that it was she who brought the Man to the school as beyond her the roof caves in.

Her grades drop drastically. She can’t focus in school when she can tilt her head just a few degrees and catch sight of the Man, just outside the window, his nonexistent eyes fixed on her. On the days she does make it through the whole day of school, she takes the earliest bus home and sits alone in her room, nominally doing homework but in actuality trawling through years-old forums and half-defunct webpages, trying to figure out if she is the only one in the entire world to have this happen to her.

At first, it’s fairly easy to sort out what’s clearly just someone on the internet looking for clicks—shitty grammar, obvious jumpscares, and all. Then, she had to sift through the more elegant fakes—elaborate YouTube channels, blogs styled like archives and journals. Even after all of that, there were still hundreds of accounts to look through.

The Man seemed to have three things in common, through all the legitimate accounts she could find—he had been around for centuries, if not _forever_ , he has a penchant for haunting children, and he brings death. Unequivocally.

After this realization she spends the next day lying in bed, staring at the ceiling. She doesn’t fault herself for that.

No escape. Ever. What can she do? Get out of the house, definitely—she can’t risk exposing the people around her to him any more than she already has. But go where? She’s all of thirteen years old, and all she’s got is the word of a few complete strangers on the weird side of the internet telling her what her best plan of action might be. Even hopping from place to place isn’t a confirmed escape—the Man is nothing if not persistent.

Listless, she scrolls through a forum she’s trawled thousands of times before, looking for a thread she hasn’t read yet. There’s one thread that hasn’t been updated since mid-2017 that hasn’t been purpled out to indicate she’s read it before. She taps it.

“Regarding SF records—people got out?” is the title.

She scrolls through the entire thread, even though it’s not terribly densely populated, eyes growing wider by the second.

_People got out_.

It’s a small thread—only a few people sharing their experiences, barely a dozen—but all of them looked legitimate. And all of them are still alive. They all had experiences similar to her—the Man had been stalking them since childhood, and had brought harm to them and the people around them—but they all managed to get out.

She can’t find many patterns in their accounts. Some started on meds, which apparently one singular pharmaceuticals company has a monopoly on, one said they actually _talked_ to the Man and struck up some sort of deal, but most of them—the overwhelming majority of them—just _stopped_. Stopped looking at him, talking about him, recording their interactions with him—just completely ignored him.

Ignore the Man. He might lose his interest.

A smile, the first one in weeks, barely touches her lips. She can do that.

* * *

_Interlude._

_The camera pans in on a hospital room. An old woman is lying in a bed, the gentle beeping of the heart monitor the only sound in the room. Her face is tired, but the smile lines about her eyes and mouth speak of joy once lived. The camera fuzzes—then starts again. Now, a man, looking to be younger than the older woman but still with touches of grey in his hair, sits beside the older woman. He reaches out and takes her hand. She opens her eyes and smiles at him._

JAMES CORENTHAL

Maryann…I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner. I’m sorry.

MARYANN CORENTHAL

(smiling a little, voice a little acidic)

I had a feeling you’d turn up sooner or later, Jim. I know you’ve had to be on the run for a while, I understand, baby. I missed you. You’ve—you look like you’ve had a rough go of it.

_James and Maryann Corenthal are speaking to each other in person for the first time in thirty years, not through voice recordings or letters or hidden cyphers. She squeezes his hand. He exhales and bows his head to kiss her palm, as gently as he would hold a butterfly._

JAMES

(a little shaky, trying to lift her spirits as much as his)

Maryann, don’t even get me started on looks. Lemme tell you—you done something new to your hair? You look stunning.

_That startles a laugh out of Maryann, but it turns into coughing. The heartrate monitor picks up its beeping and James rubs her back gently. She taps at his shoulder as she tries to regain her breath, trying to form words._

MARYANN

I saw our son, James. I don’t know if I told you—I can’t remember—it was so long ago.

JAMES

Tell me again.

MARYANN

Jeff. All grown up. But too young, at the same time. James, our son didn’t recognize me.

JAMES

(voice tight)

I know, Maryann.

MARYANN

(quietly)

James. I missed you, baby. Answering machine messages just aren’t the same.

JAMES

(He lets out a shuddery breath. His eyes are wet but he is too proud to wipe them)

I missed you too. I’m so sorry I had to leave you like that. I love you.

_Maryann’s fingers twitch around his hand._

MARYANN

I love you too. It’s okay. (A pause.) It’s not, really. But I’m too old to be mad at you.

_They sit in silence—the comfortable, heavy silence of two people who have grown as familiar to each other over the years as a hand is familiar to a glove. Ambient sound rushes and grows like the susurrus of trees._

MARYANN

(regretfully, knowing she is placing a burden on the shoulders of a man holding too much already)

James.

JAMES

(Holding her hands, gently rubbing them to try and warm them up)

Maryann.

_Maryann smiles, gently, sadly._

MARYANN

Bring our children home, James. I know it’s a lot. I know that’s what you’ve been trying to do all this time. But baby, I miss you all so much.

_James’ shoulders begin to shake, and he bows over her hands as tears slowly begin to drip from his eyes._

JAMES

I’m trying, Maryann, I’m trying. I promise. I’ll bring them home.

_The heart rate monitor slows, logarithmically, until it finally stops. James Corenthal crumbles apart, alone in a hospital room. Miles and miles away, four near-random children spontaneously burst into tears._

_Maryann Corenthal has died._

_BREAK._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, you can find me @a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com. Take care of yourself.


	6. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stakes are raised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW: death, slight gore, emetophobia, fires

High school movies are fucking stupid. They’re like “Here is a beautiful girl that’s bullied but oh guess what she can actually sing/dance/act/is just beautiful which we guess is good enough because she doesn’t _really_ need to have a personality” and then they’re like “here’s a man! That’s her happy ending!” and all of that is infuriating to Steph, but the most annoying part of these movies is that somehow high school culture is still stuck in the early 2000s and bullying mostly takes place in person.

She’s gotten really good at ignoring hate comments and weird DMs lately. Even the flurry of fake promposals that started up at the end of this school year, she’d gotten pretty good and disregarding. Nothing she can do about groupchats and snarky hallway comments but she just keeps her head down, keeps going, and keeps thinking about how the moment this year is done, she can start planning for the time in the near future where she can get the fuck out of here with a scholarship to a school as far out of state as she can manage.

No one in school has found her side Instagram account though—she’ll take that as a win, since it’s hooked up to her YouTube, which is hooked up to her TikTok, and—she doesn’t need to see the future to know where that road leads.

When she gets home, it’s empty, but that doesn’t surprise her. Her mom’s been working late recently, and her brother has soccer after school—she needs to remember to pick him up—and she drops her backpack by the door. She heads upstairs, her feet thumping on the worn wood stairs, and makes a beeline for the bathroom. Makeup smudges off in streaks of black and tan, hints of red, and she stares at her bare face in the mirror.

She’s bored. And if she has to think about her homework or classes or anything relating to high school right now, she’ll _scream_.

She gathers items: tripod, phone, eyeshadows and glosses and pencils and blush, deep and red as blood. Setting up a shot is second nature to her—tripod clicks in with a satisfying _snap_ , ring lights snap _on_ , and she adjusts the angle until it frames her face right.

Steph takes a deep breath. Lets it out. Looks at the camera, then past it, to her own face reflected in the vanity mirror. She smiles.

The next time she looks at the camera, there is shadow and darkness on her eyelids, streaks of pencil tearing her lips into jagged gashes curved up towards her temples, and blush dabbed on her teeth, as deep and red as blood. She snarls at it as freak folk plays over the phone speaker.

She spends a few minutes slicing down the half-hour or so of footage, then decides not to think about it anymore and just post the damn TikTok, “tutorial coming soon” in the bio and all. She’ll edit a byte for Instagram later, before she gets to work putting together the tutorial for YouTube.

Steph has what she would call a modest following. Not a ton of people are super into gore/SFX set to music one could generously describe as “[Victorian waifs with throats full of nails](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1damn9i4JEo?)”, but she hits a certain niche crowd that’s pretty nice to her and frankly, that’s fine with her. Her YouTube account? Also fairly sparse, but when genre-wise, her little DMSL channel rubbing shoulders with channels like [Glam&Gore](https://www.youtube.com/user/GlamAndGoreMakeup) and [ellimacs](https://www.youtube.com/user/macsmoser), she will take what she can get. And it’s fun to do—she will take what crumbs of enjoyment she can find.

There’s something meditative about looking at yourself as a canvas instead of a person. You strip away the meaning behind the canvas and you are left with unlimited potential. A voyeur in your own body. And when the images and memories that float around in her brain can be expressed in a medium that can be washed away? Even better.

Marginally calmer, Steph rummages around in her makeup drawer until she finds some wipes and starts cleaning her face off for the second time that day. The overdramatic smokey eye goes first, then the Chelsea grin, then finally the thick layer of blush over her lips and teeth—god, she can’t wait to buy actual scab and drip blood instead of resorting to burning through half a container of blush per look.

Her vanity is next to the window of her room that overlooks the forest. She doesn’t look outside her window. She knows what she will see already, and she knows what will happen if she acknowledges him.

He’s been more persistent lately. She can feel him without looking, the same way she has her entire life.

She had begun to ignore him about four years ago in the hopes that he might leave her alone. He’s been quiet since then, for the most part—hanging around her only a few times a year max instead of the few times a week when things were really bad. It took her being the first person out of the school fire, having to watch other kids come running out, witnessing the screams and the sirens while the Man stands behind her, silent and unmistakable, to realize that it was he who brought the fire.

When she was little, it was fun to have an audience for her art, especially since her mom worked such long hours and rarely had time for her or her little brother when she got home. As she got older, she learned that the Man was more than just someone who took her art when she wasn’t looking. He brought trouble. She couldn’t explain it, but as she got older, the more he showed up the closer she was to something terrible happening.

The Man didn’t leave her alone, not entirely. Bad things would happen then things would be silent. He comes in waves, like the sea. She tries not to think about him and most of the time, she succeeds.

He’d been more present, lately. His presence is like fingers, pressing gently in on her temples, gentle now but the threat of crushing force always a possibility. She _also_ tries not to think about what his increased presence means for her and the people around her. The more anxious and scared she becomes, the more he knows she’s acknowledging him and the worse things will get.

Her phone buzzes on the table. Time to pick up Andrew. She shoves her phone in her purse and clatters down the stairs. With her look, the Man will be hanging out by the field goal.

* * *

Two weeks later, she gets accepted into Princeton. Visual arts. $40k scholarship.

Two weeks and one day later, her house nearly burns down.

She takes the late bus home after spending the afternoon helping a friend work on the mural wall at their school. Acrylic paint clings to her hands in flakes and she brushes them absentmindedly against her jeans. Her shoulders ache from reaching up to get the tips of the wall with her paintbrush and she smiles, already thinking of the next addition to the wall.

The bus lets her off at her stop and she walks home, barely feeling the weight of her backpack. The early spring air is fresh and damp against her face and the breeze ruffles her hair. It’s beautiful out, and the trees are kissed with the pinkish-red of buds.

She rounds the corner to their house, looking forward to ragging her mom about the paint she got all over her jeans. She looks down—it’s not that bad, surely?

A drop of blood seems to fall in slow motion, seeping into the fibers of her jeans.

Slowly, she brings her hand up to touch her nose. A throbbing begins in her head, pulsing in her temples and radiating inwards. Her hand comes away covered in a slick of blood.

She drops her bag and sprints up the driveway.

The house is empty. Quiet. Her brother isn’t in his room playing the FPS du jour. Her mother is not upstairs tapping at her keyboard. Her breath is coming fast, even though she’s so lightheaded she can’t be getting enough oxygen. She ignores the headache, ignores the nosebleed, ignores the blood dripping sickeningly down the back of her throat. It’s empty. Empty empty empty.

With a terrible sense of foreboding, she looks to the window.

The Man tilts his terrible head at her.

She rushes down the stairs, feet clattering and echoing in the silence. She throws open the door to the backyard and rushes into the woods. _Please_ , she begs silently, too out-of-breath to speak. _Please, please, please—_

She finds her brother first. He is slumped at the base of a tree, moss-covered, dripping with dew. “Andrew!” Steph cries out. He doesn’t move.

She shakes him. He slumps over, limp. No breath warms her hand when she holds her hand to his nose.

It is then that she sees the tiny, perfect sapling that has taken root, sprouting up out of the soft gap between his ribs and his hips, pinning his body to the ground.

She stumbles back and vomits, sullying the dead leaves of the forest ground with bile. He is so cold, so still.

There’s nothing. Nothing left in him. He’s a shell. That’s not her brother. He’s the Man’s now.

_Her mother_.

She leaves the remains of what used to be her brother and goes deeper into the forest.

“Mom!” Her voice echoes weirdly among the trees. Flat. A bird calls, but it’s wrong, warbling like a bad record.

She finds her mother strung up on a tree like a banner. Parts of her she never should have to see, decorations strewn in the branches. She retches again, empty, and begins to shake.

She should have known. This is her fault. Her fault. Hers.

The Man stands over her as she shakes and whimpers on the ground. Drool and bile drip from her mouth as she screams into the loam. It fills her mouth, bitter on her tongue like ash. She can feel his presence. She wonders in the back of her mind if she had ever stopped.

How could she _ever_ have deluded herself into thinking that the people around her would be safe?

She carries death with her. Like poison, like sickness that withers green leaves before they unfurl.

Dusk falls and slides sideways into night. She can’t think of moving from this spot. She’ll die here and let her bones become part of the soil. She’ll let the vines take over her skin.

The Man looks at her. She feels the weight of his gaze on the back of her neck like a physical blow. He looks up and past her, to the house. She knows what he wants her to do.

“ _north,”_ says the Man, in the first and last instance she will ever hear-feel his voice.

With one last tearing pain in her head, he leaves her presence.

She climbs the tree and takes her mother down. With her own hands, she puts her back together. She carries her to their home and puts her down just inside the house. She doesn’t feel the weight.

When she returns to bring her brother home, the sapling has grown as tall as her hip. She has to lift his body off of the tree. She puts him down next to her mother’s body. She tries to ignore the sluggish trickle of blood draining from his side.

She turns on every single gas burner, strikes a match, and curls up against her mother’s side.

Fate is cruel.

The firefighters are called. The police are called. The house is extinguished before even the smoke is enough to kill her. She watches men in protective gear troop into the burned shell of her home like ants. She is ushered gently but firmly into a police car and taken to the station. People rush about her. She is forgotten.

Steph doesn’t realize she is rocking back and forth in her chair, hands clamped firmly over her ears, until someone puts a hand on her. She freezes like a cornered rabbit, heart thumping in her chest. She looks up as if scared of a blow.

“Stephanie Adler?” A kind-faced man looks down at her.

She nods. She doesn’t trust her voice.

“I’m Detective Samson. Come with me,” he says. He keeps his hand at her elbow, as if he’s worried she can’t walk by herself.

She would be offended if it weren’t for the way her legs wobbled as she followed him to his office.

“Take a seat, Stephanie,” he says as he rounds his desk. “Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?”

She shakes her head. She doesn’t want to swallow anything right now. It feels too close to choking.

He sits down behind his desk and clasps his hands in front of him. “Stephanie, I’m afraid I have bad news.”

She looks up at him. Her head is filled with this pounding, expanding sense of horror.

“You saw your house burning down. You and your family were in the house at the time.”

Steph breathes out, lightheaded. Her head feels like a balloon, strained to breaking point, about to snap and spiral into the air.

He keeps talking. “I’m sorry to say your mother has passed.”

Her breath catches in her throat. She looks up. “My brother?” Her voice feels like she swallowed coals.

“He’s in the ICU as we speak. Smoke inhalation. Among other things.”

She doesn’t know whether she wants to sob from grief or from relief. “Can I see him? Please?”

“In a bit, Stephanie,” says Detective Samson. “I just want to ask you a few quick questions.”

She can feel her hands start to shake. “Steph,” she says quietly. “It’s Steph.”

“Steph,” he says gently. “You came home late?”

“Yes,” she whispers.

“You didn’t see any signs of another person there?”

“No.”

“You usually come home from school at two-thirty, correct?”

“Yes.”

“But today you came home at four.”

She looks up and meets his eyes. “I was helping a friend finish a mural,” she says. Her hands shake worse. “I didn’t—you don’t—I didn’t—”

The detective looks at her. His tone of voice is kind but his eyes are cold. “Your brother was impaled. Your mother had a deep incision on her abdomen. Do you know what could have caused that?”

She shakes her head and looks down at her hands. “Please,” she whispers. “Let me see my brother.”

He stands up. “I’ll get someone to drive you to the hospital,” he says. “And we’ll arrange for you to stay the night somewhere. Do you have anyone you feel comfortable with staying with for the foreseeable future?”

She still can’t believe what had just happened. She can’t think about the future now. “I’m a legal adult,” she says. “I can’t—I don’t need to—I can’t just—”

“I understand,” he says. “Believe me. I’ve seen things I wish I could forget. We will try our best to figure this out but for now—please work with us.”

He hands her off to another officer, who drives her to the hospital. She isn’t allowed to touch Andrew. She stands on the other side of the glass window and looks in at him, pale and still under a white hospital sheet. The beeping of the medical instruments sound unreal, like a sound byte from a TV show. She can see his chest stutter and struggle to rise with every breath he takes.

This is her fault, and the knowledge of it wears her down like waves against stone.

The Man had never shown up that often. He had never been that persistent before. Not even when things were bad when she was little. She should have known something terrible was going to happen. She should have known. She should have _known_.

Her brother was still _alive_.

Guilty. Guiltyguiltyguiltyguiltyguilty—

She didn’t know she had been saying it out loud until someone touches her shoulder.

She opens her eyes with a start. She is crouching on the floor in front of the visitor’s window, and her throat is raw.

“Steph?” It’s one of her friends’ mom. She looks scared. Steph doesn’t blame her. She probably looked terrifying. “The police department contacted us. I’m so sorry—do you—you can stay with us until you get settled, if you want?”

Steph stands up. Her knees are achy—just how long was she out? “Thank you,” she says. Her voice is gravelly, like she’d been screaming for hours. “Thank you.”

She follows the woman out to the parking lot, and steps numbly into her car.

The Man is there, standing underneath a streetlight. He doesn’t cast a shadow.

She slumps down in the car seat and closes her eyes. Maybe she really is insane.

The next few days, she mostly sleeps. Jackie sets her up in an unused bedroom and leaves food outside the door. Time is weird. Steph tries to eat when she feels hungry, which isn’t often. Sometimes she drives her to see her brother in the hospital. Two days after the housefire, he dies.

They tell her it’s sepsis, but she overhears two nurses in the stairwell—it wasn’t just a bacterial infection, they say. Coughing until he couldn’t breathe, like he was drowning on dry land. _What_ _kind_ _of_ _infection_ , asks one nurse, _makes_ _a_ _patient_ _hack_ _up_ _black_ _tar?_

She can’t help but think the Man is sending her a message.

“Baruch dayan ha’emet,” she says numbly, and time fuzzes again.

There’s a double funeral. She tears the ribbon with shaking hands. She’s asked to speak and she can’t get through more than a few lines of her pre-written speech before her mouth goes numb and she can’t— _can’t—_ make words come out of her mouth. She just can’t.

She leaves, shaking, and sits in the bathroom by herself, forcing herself to breathe.

It is she who lays the first three shovelfuls of dirt on her mother and brother’s grave. She stands back as friends and family fill in the grave, then offer their condolences to her. She still hasn’t cried yet.

Jackie’s family isn’t Jewish so there is no traditional meal or visitors coming by to alleviate the pain, to let her grieve in community. Jackie’s mom doesn’t push her to go to school or anything like that. Her grades are good enough to carry her through even so.

Two weeks go by. She recites the Kaddish at the synagogue. And she has officially graduated high school.

Jackie’s mom buys her a cupcake. She lights the candle and blows it out, and it is then that she finally feels tears dripping down her cheeks, as hot as blood and just as salty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A few side notes!
> 
> A) I am not Jewish! This is written with a hefty amount of Googling and a bit of pestering my Jewish friends, but I am by no means an expert, so if I've misstepped somewhere or made a mistake please, please let me know what I can do to fix it!
> 
> B) The decision to make Steph an SFX vlogger was solely based around [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF3FIaf-3jc) Glam&Gore video where she gets heckled by her boyfriend while trying to make SFX looks for cheap and it had massive Steph and Evan energy. That is all.
> 
> C) This is where I'm gonna have to start relying on your suspension of disbelief--this is where it turns from a canon sequel to more of an AU.
> 
> D) If you can guess the two things I'm referencing in how I killed off her family I'll give you a virtual cookie 
> 
> E) Still on Tumblr @a-flickering-soul! Come yell at me!


	7. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things have to get worse before they get better. Or is it more like "Things have to get better before they get worse"? Either one will do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for panic attacks, dissociation

The first video she posts takes a year for her to make. It is filmed in her shitty little apartment in Princeton, only a few weeks before the semester starts. The lighting is garbage and she barely edits it. There’s no music in the background, just silence and the sound of a makeup sponge brushing over skin.

She paints her face entirely white with shitty water-based face paint, the kind that needs three different layers to be opaque. She lines her eyes with the same water-soluble paint in red, reversing the cat-eye and elongating the wing until it points eerily up to her temples.

She looks straight into the camera and lets tears pour down her face. It’s easy, even a year after her mother and brother’s deaths, to cry. After this video is done, she will light two candles for them.

Red streaks down her face, following her teartracks. She resists the urge to wipe away her tears, holding her gaze toward the lens. There’s power in grieving in front of others, even if it’s virtual.

Her TikTok, the subsequent Instagram post, and YouTube message all have the same caption:

_Been away for a while. Unforeseen circumstances, family losses, etc. Back now. Stay tuned._

She posts everything and turns her phone off. She washes her face, taking care to scrub every bit of white paint from her face. She’s had enough of creatures with faces whited out.

She’s too far from her hometown now to visit her mother and brother’s graves, but she lights a candle for them anyways. It flickers once, twice, then begins to burn steadily, flame stretching up toward the sky.

Steph closes her eyes, says her prayer, and then she’s out the door.

Taking night classes is, given her past, a bit of a risk for obvious reasons, but frankly Steph is at the point in her life where she truly, deeply believes that the Man has nothing else to take from her. She might as well get an education with the time she has left on this earth. There’s nothing she can do. Why not just keep going?

She’s only taking two classes her first semester—her writing seminar and a painting class. Tonight is the painting one, and she enjoys it for the most part—it’s a new challenge, painting on stretched canvas instead of her own skin. It’s a lot easier in that she doesn’t have to take into account the altered angle looking in the mirror versus just looking straight on, but a lot more difficult in terms of how the paint soaks in and blends. She likes it as much as she could like anything nowadays.

It sounds absolutely pathetic, but the most social interaction she gets nowadays is really through social media. There’s just something about a thousand-yard stare and heavy black eyeliner that warns people away, and the few enterprising extroverts that tried to sit down next to her and strike up a conversation are disappointed quickly enough when she gives them lukewarm responses.

No one has recognized her through TikTok yet though, which is a blessing.

She spends her days muddling through the bits of classwork she gets, and working in the library shelving books. It’s quiet—quiet enough that she is alone with her thoughts for the most of it. Usually she tries to think about—anything, really. The new book she’s reading, ideas for more videos, what she wants to paint next for her class. She’s trying to think about her family more. Like stretching a hurt muscle. Little baby steps, trying to diminish the association between her mom’s smile, her brother’s laugh, with the agony of knowing they’re gone.

Things have been quiet recently—and not just in the literal sense. It seems paranormal happenings have slowed down, as much as she doesn’t want to jinx what appears like good luck a year too late. She hasn’t seen the Man since the housefire. Hasn’t even felt him. She hasn’t had a nosebleed in months.

It’s going to be a new year. Maybe it will be a truly sweet one this time.

She’s trying therapy again. She feels like she deserves it, at this point, and if Princeton offers free therapy with tuition, she might as well go. She likes her therapist—at the beginning of her sessions, she told Steph to just call her “Lara” instead of the full-blown “Doctor Zheng”, and that slip in formality automatically distinguished Lara in Steph’s mind as someone she likes quite a deal more than anyone she’s seen before. Even though after every session, Steph’s brain and collective psyche feel stripped raw and twisted from not only the emotional vulnerability but from the mental dancing-around of the nature of the beast that follows her.

This week, her “homework” was to be more _present_. “You live in the past,” said Lara, peering at her through the clear plastic glasses Steph has always secretly wanted to snatch off her nose and paint all over. “And I’m not saying this to diminish the trauma you have lived through. But to live in the past is to ignore the present. Try—” she twists her mouth, chewing over her words, then says, “—try to be more present. I know that’s easier said than done. We can go through some methods that worked for other people, or if you want you can go it alone—either way, I trust your judgement of yourself, for the most part.”

Steph had ended up going it alone. At that point in the session, she was just exhausted and wanted to go back to her studio and curl up in bed. Now, though, she’s wondering if it might have been easier to just have asked for help and chosen a method off a sheet.

She reaches the studio building most of the art classes on campus are held in and pulls the door open. She catalogues the contrast of her hand—pale skin, flecks of black still on her nails—against the metal door handle. The pull of her muscle as she heaves the door open.

What she settled on eventually, after a day or so of just pure recuperating from that session, was to keep tabs on the inner workings of her mind just as carefully as she schooled her thoughts and habits away from the Man. For every negative interaction, for every looming anxiety attack or dissociative episode, she takes a breath and names two—maybe even three if she’s really wilding—good things that are happening right this second.

It’s hard. There was one really bad moment yesterday where she woke up and in her sleep-muddled soft-headed state thought she was back home. She could almost hear her brother clattering down the stairs, too loud for the morning, and the sound of her mom singing as she flips Sunday morning pancakes. She could almost see, even, her old room, covered in band posters and fairy lights and drapes. Then she remembered, and the guilt that triggered was so heavy and instant that she felt like she was being crushed under its weight.

She had taken a deep breath—deep, as deep as she could manage, and let it go, let it ground herself back in her body before the pain she felt could take her somewhere she couldn’t come back from.

Then another one. Deeper, this time.

Then she lifted her head, and it felt like she was lifting a bag of clay with her neck alone. She looked up.

_Two things._

The sun came in through the windowpane and looked almost pink.

_One more thing_.

She can’t—

_Just one more thing_.

Her blankets are nice and warm.

_That’s it_.

That’s what healing feels like.

Steph rolls up to her painting class only ten minutes late but that’s plenty of time for her to decide on her next project.

Multi-media. Maybe a collage. Maybe even some pottery shards.

She wants to paint her family.

Her online following comes trickling back after a cute little bait-and-switch makeover she posted made it to the FYP. When she starts supplementing her SFX with bits and pieces of whatever piece of art she makes—a video of her smashing pots for a mosaic, a close-up zoom as she painstakingly fills in an eye—her numbers climb back up to where they were post-everything.

Lara asks her how she feels about putting part of her mourning process on the internet. “Are you doing this for yourself?” she asks her. “Are you absolutely sure this helps, and isn’t a way for you to seek external validation through performance?"

Steph is ready for her when she asks that, as she’s thought the same thing to herself nearly every day for the past few months. “I don’t think so,” she says. “I don’t think this is just a clicks thing. I’m _good_ at art, I’m _good_ at filming shit. How is this any different from honoring them through art and then hanging it in a gallery for critics to pick at?”

Lara is nodding, sitting back in her chair, but Steph keeps going. It’s important for her to voice her thoughts, she’s learning, for herself as well as the people around her. “I can look at my hands as I edit the video. I can watch myself draw my mother’s favorite skirt out of shattered pottery and embroidery floss. I can see my brother’s hands take shape in watercolor over the course of two hours, condensed into a thirty-second clip. If other people like that—fine! I’m not going to complain, especially when I can link to my YouTube and get adrev. But I do this for myself. I’ve thought about this a lot.”

“I can tell,” Lara says, but she’s smiling. “You know, Margaret Atwood was pretty scathing about you being your own voyeur, but I doubt she has ever met you, Steph.”

They’re brave words, and she was brave that day. Things in her head go up and down, even as her surroundings and day-to-day life are as regular as they can get. Some days, she will be as fine as she could be, then the slick feeling of oil paint over her fingers feels just close enough to her mother’s insides and it will send her into dry heaves, retching up nothing as her body tries to push the trigger away. Other days will just start bad and end up worse—a dream or some other hidden trigger will set her off, and by the time her night classes arrive, she’s a numb not-person, just a thing with a body.

She keeps naming good things. Sometimes they’re extravagant—the euphoria of receiving a commendation for her work, or new clothes, crisp and unwrinkled in their tissue paper packaging. Usually, though, they’re more simple—waking up early, gasping from nightmares, but catching the sunrise for the first time in years. A hot cup of coffee for cold fingers. A stray cat she meets next to the Hoagie Haven dumpster who nearly flops out of the container to come trot up to her and say hi.

Most importantly, she keeps making art. Most of the time, they skew dark. Steph is half-convinced her art prof is worried about her and dreads the day the poor man decides to Google her name and gets slapped in the face with every single traumatic event that’s tailed her for her entire life. It’s satisfying in the same way it is satisfying to watch her face become distorted and twisted into something monstrous. She can watch what she draws take shape, can add teeth and eyes and shadow as she wills it, and in that way she can see what makes them scary.

She never draws the Man. She doesn’t even draw scenes of water, or fire. She enjoys scary things, but she isn’t an idiot.

The big art piece, the multi-media one of her family, takes a while. There are periods where she works on it near-manically for hours at a stretch, then weeks where she can’t even look at it at all. Piece by piece, it takes shape. Her mother’s favorite skirt, decorated with tiny porcelain flowers she chipped out of old thrift-store plates. Her brother’s hands, stitched into fabric and glued to the canvas.

She doesn’t end up finishing the piece in time for it to be in her final portfolio, but that just means she can take it home and work on it there. It lives for a bit propped up against the wall of her tiny one-room apartment, facing the wall so she doesn’t risk damaging her work.

She’s going through a phase where it’s hard to look at again. She picks up something else to keep her hands occupied—a watercolor of a forest, with something low to the ground and snarling prowling through the trees.

She fixes the camera on the tripod so it captures her hands. She’s going to be filming something different today.

* * *

_Interlude_

_The camera blurs, then focuses on two hands over a sheet of watercolor paper. The paper depicts a forest at night, sketched out in faint pencil. Lurking between the trees is something hard to make out, but lightly sketched out in pen is a lupine figure with sharp teeth._

STEPH

(quietly at first, then gaining courage)

Hi, guys. This video is going to be a little unorthodox. I know this isn’t exactly the kind of content you all signed up for, which is why I’m keeping this video YouTube-only and not really, uh, promoting it on any other platforms.

_The hands on the screen hover over a palette of watercolors, then change their mind and move to the rubber cement watercolor resist. They begin blocking out the monster’s shape._

STEPH

I’ve received a few—not many, just like two or three—DMs from people in the community who reached out after I took that really unexpected year hiatus about six months ago. To those people—thank you so much. Even that bit of support meant a lot to me. For real. (Quietly) I’ve been feeling, uh. . . really alone lately.

_The hands begin to load a brush up with black paint, dragging it in decisive stripes down the sheet. They mix it with blue on the paper, creating shadow and depth. With a smaller brush, they tease out thin, bare branches and twigs._

STEPH

I don’t want this to be a pity party. I’m not posting this for clout. I just. . . feel as if it would be fair that you guys know what happened.

_The hands wash diluted purple over the entire sheet of paper. The sky is red._

STEPH

(slow, measured, as if she’s trying to control her emotions)

What happened was. . . (she exhales). So long story short, my house burned down and I lost my entire family. Both my mother and brother. I’ve been—living by myself ever since. I don’t really have family outside of them. I’ve been just—going to college, trying to live normally, because I know that’s what they would’ve wanted, they wouldn’t have wanted me to live in mourning my whole life.

_They scrape away the rubber cement, revealing clean blank paper. They load up the small brush with black again and begin filling in the shape of the monster._

STEPH

It’s been hard. (She laughs) I mean, yeah, duh, it’s been hard. It uh—it fucking sucks most of the time, I’m not gonna lie. But I have fun doing these videos and uh, chatting and interacting with you guys. And I see a therapist! Yeah, that’s pretty, uh—I’m pretty proud of being good and going to therapy like a, uh, functioning human being.

_The eyes are filled in red, undiluted._

STEPH

And, uh, I can already hear the people clacking on their keyboards like ‘this is fake, she’s doing this for clout!’ and I can also hear the people going like ‘okay the housefire was a year ago so that means this, this, and this, so Damsel’s name and location or whatever is this’ and uh? Maybe don’t? First off this _did_ happen, but I don’t really care whether you believe me or not, this is mostly just for the people I know who were actually curious about this.

_With a white gel pen, the eyes are outlined. Definition is added to the fur and the teeth are filled in, wickedly sharp._

STEPH

(more animated now, getting a little annoyed)

Second off, please don’t doxx me over the death of my family? I would really like to remain, uh, you know, as safe as I can be right now, and _trust me_ , I don’t need anything else on my plate right now. And, uh, this isn’t a threat or anything, but uh. . . (She trails off, as if unsure of how to say what she wants to say.) Bad luck follows me pretty closely. You don’t want to get involved. Trust me.

_With the same gel pen, highlights are added to the trees. Speckles cluster in the purple sky as stars, and the white pen makes a thin fingernail-slice in the sky for the moon._

STEPH

So I just wanna say. . . thanks. For all of you that stuck around with me through that time, and everyone new who came in. I’m okay. Mostly. I’m going to be okay. And I’m going to do it for my family. I’m going to be happy, and smart, and safe, and—yeah. You uh, you get the idea. That’s all I had planned for this video, I know it’s a little weird today but—enjoy the art! Sleep well, beloveds. This is Damsel, signing off.

_The camera shifts from the stationary overhead view to closeups of the finished painting. The camera pans over the canvas, focusing on small details—a bare branch reaching out through the sky, the wicked point of the monster’s teeth. The screen fades to black, and the video ends._

_BREAK._

* * *

It was a huge risk, she knows, putting that video up. So many personal details, and honestly usually she’s all for healthy creator-audience boundaries, but. . . she doesn’t know. Part of it is the healing process, she guesses—it’s getting easier and easier to think about her family, even if some days the hurt cores her like an apple. Most of it, though, is her just wanting to get the constant DMs and comments off her back. Which is selfish, in a way, but also an act of catharsis.

Steph worries that part of it, subconsciously, is the need for people to see her. To pay attention to her. To be a part in this ongoing social media experience where she turns the camera on herself in different ways each week.

She tries not to think about it too much.

By her second semester at university, she’s figured out what works for her and what doesn’t—her days fall into a comfortable-enough routine. Wake up, cook herself something to eat later on her narrow little two-burner stove, then try to make the most of the nice daytime light filming a video or working on art pieces. On bad days, she just lies in the sun and tries to be gentle with herself. Towards the afternoon and evening, work and classes start, and she has actual human contact again instead of looking at a screen. It works pretty well. She isn’t afraid of the dark—her horrors have always appeared in broad daylight.

She should have known not to get too complacent. Has she learned nothing from her past? The moment she gets comfortable, something happens to take it away.

She’s painting a commission from a follower—one of her first, actually, and she had laid down the first sketchlines with more than a bit of pride—when her phone pings. She ignores it and tries to figure out if this figure’s skin tone needed a bit more warm gold or not.

It pings again.

And again.

And again.

Steph frowns and picks up the phone, swiping through to look at the notifications. They’re nearly all from TikTok chat messages, with a scattered few from Instagram DMs.

The first one, from an Instagram account that’s almost entirely blank (followed her three months ago), says “This you?” with a screenshot of—she swears out loud, forgetting there’s no one around to hear her.

A screencap of the local news site in her town from a year and a half ago.

“Family house burns down, leaving daughter the sole survivor. Arson suspected, police say.”

A picture of the shell of their house. She knows if she looks at the trees just barely in frame, there will be a tall, thin figure there that only she can see.

She blocks the account.

Almost every single DM after that is pretty much the same. The really adventurous ones have her whole name and old address—although none of them have been canny enough to figure out exactly where in Princeton she’s living now, thank goodness.

She unlists the video and spends the rest of the day double-checking to make sure the locations of her Instagram is unlisted, her VPN is working correctly, and that none of her YouTube videos or Tweets have anything at all hinting at her current location.

At the end of the day, when it’s time to go to her classes, she double-checks that she locks the door and leaves with a switchblade clipped on her waistband. The Man she might be familiar with—after all, he’s never physically hurt _her_ —but she’s defenseless against internet freaks who fancy themselves vigilantes.

When she gets back from classes—another art class, a bullshit math class to get another gen ed out of the way, and printmaking—she takes her phone off of “Do Not Disturb” to a flood of new notifications.

Much of the same—some messages almost definitely from accounts she’s blocked before. There’s one that makes her pause, though, and set her phone aside to tackle later, when she’s not about to shake apart from fear.

She makes herself dinner and forces herself to eat at least a few mouthfuls. Anxiety roils in her stomach. She doesn’t want this. She finally has some semblance of normalcy back and she _can’t_ let it get taken away again.

The Man...he’s like a virus. The more preventative measures she takes, the safer she is. If she just doesn’t think about him, come into contact with carriers, let him into her house…the less likely it is for him to come back into her life and take away what she loves.

_All that you love will be carried away_ , she thinks, and forces down another bite of food.

Stomach full, she slouches down on her corner pick-up couch and picks up her phone. One unread message—Instagram notif—blinks at her. She opens it.

The picture of the burnt-out house. And a message.

_What can you tell me about the thing in the trees?_

She doesn’t know how to answer that one. She’s spent so long alone in this curse that, even though she built her childhood on trawling forums and websites for scraps of proof she’s not alone, she’s forgotten that this isn’t a situation unique to her. Even if this person is real and not another viewer just trying to psych her out, what does she do? If she tells them what she knows, she risks spreading the Man’s influence farther. But if she stays silent, doesn’t tell the person what little she knows…will another person’s blood be on her hands? What if she knows something the other person desperately needs to know? Can she take that risk?

She leaves the message on read for two days. The person doesn’t try to contact her again, despite her constant worry that they might try something more drastic to gain her attention. In the end, that’s what haunts her—even through her daily routine and classes and work, worrying over this person trying to contact her again, they never did. As if they just gave up.

It reminded Steph of herself.

On the third day, she wakes up to the sunlight streaking in through her window, dipping just a bit into her eyes. The seasons are changing. Spring is coming soon.

She rolls over in bed, drags the covers up higher over her chin, and grabs her phone. She opens the Instagram app.

_I’m sorry,_ she types. _I can’t help you. I don’t know why he stopped following me and I don’t know if he’ll come for me again. If you’ve seen him already, there’s nothing I can do to help you. Please don’t message me again._

People want the truth. Just like she did, all the way back in middle school when she first learned the hard way that the Man only brought pain. A fair amount of the messages she receives are from people like her, people who see the Man too and want to know how he left her alone. She can’t tell them anything. She just can’t take that risk. She can’t bring the Man’s eyes on them, or back to her again.

Sometimes, on bad days when she wants to hurt herself, she thinks about the people she has damned through her silence. The people who didn’t have time to comb endlessly through decade-old archived forums, who didn’t have the money to afford Vivirten. Who needed the tiny scraps of knowledge she had. How bloody are her hands? How many people has she damned?

She knows, logically, that she is one girl. What effect does she have against a monster?

But it’s the maybes that haunt her.

The other half of the messages are less noble. People somehow getting wind of what she’s going through, people who think she’s part of some elaborate unfiction setup, people who just want to dick around with someone on the internet their little pea brain refuses to acknowledge is also a real person with human emotions.

She decides to make a side account. She doesn’t want people who follow her for SFX videos to get the idea that this is a cool new venture she’s trying—the less attention she brings to herself this way, the better.

She posts one single picture—the picture that first DM sent her of her house, still smoking, with the trees beyond it and the Man only she and a few unfortunate others can see. “See the thing in the trees?” says her caption. “Try Tumblr.”

Within twelve hours, she deletes the post and refuses to field any questions asking about the meaning behind the post. With any luck, people will think she got hacked or something like that.

She doesn’t bother answering questions asking for help or information. When she does, she’s curt and gives as little as she can away. Her priority is herself—not someone on the Internet that for all she knows is a proxy for the Man. She refuses to feel bad for it. She tries.

Steph is usually pretty good at filtering out the weird messages (you don’t get big on TikTok without developing skin that’s not so much thick as it is a biological bulletproof vest). But even so, some slip through the cracks and end up sticking.

One day, she comes home from work, slings her bag onto her bed, and picks up her phone to check her notifications. An Instagram DM blinks up at her.

_I know about the man in the trees_.

She frowns. Usually the DMs she gets about the Man are a bit more frantic. _Tell me about him, then_ , she texts back.

The reply comes within seconds. _He’s a good friend of mine,_ they say, then _aXQncyBvbmx5IGEgbWF0dGVyIG9mIHRpbWUu._

Steph frowns. _You good?_

The little ‘Seen’ text pops up, but no more messages come.

_Weird_ , she thinks, then goes and takes a shower. The real Gen Z mindset, she thinks, is overtly ignoring signs of danger and then filming a TikTok about it.

By the next day, though, she gets antsy enough about it to send it to a classmate who has a head for puzzles.

_Can you break this_ , she texts them. _showed up in a book I was reading and the discussion forum is blank._

 _Looks like base64,_ they answer. _I think there’s an online converter somewhere probably._

When she has time, she hunts down the website and types it out, painstakingly checking back and forth to make sure she’s copying it out right, then hits “Decode”.

“It’s only a matter of time,” says the website.

She frowns. Even though the mystery Instagram account has left her on read for the past day, she picks up her phone and messages them again. _Is this a game to you?_ she asks. _I don’t have patience for codebreaking._

To her surprise, it’s seen almost instantly. The typing bubble pops up, then goes down, then pops up again. Instead of another message, a picture comes up instead.

It looks like some sort of—digital collage, or edit, or something, maybe—and that’s binary in the corner, she knows that much off the top of her head at least. There’s something familiar about it.

She looks closer, tries to undo the layers of distortion and grain in her head, and feels her stomach sink.

Unless she’s absolutely paranoid—which at this point in her life, she very well may be—that looks awfully similar to _her fucking apartment complex_.

Same weird orange pastel siding. Same glimpse of trees behind the streetlight. If she squints, she can almost make out a window and the entrance where you card in and take the elevator up.

Her head is buzzing with anxiety. She Googles ‘binary code breaker’ and types in, fingers fumbling at the keys, the sequence of binary at the bottom of the page.

She peers at the output the website gives her and laughs hysterically. The short, sharp burst of sound falls flat in her apartment. _Safe for now?_ When has she ever been safe? She’s been hunted since the day she was born! She stumbles to the window on shaky knees and peers out through the dusty plastic blinds. The streetlight next to her window blinds her and she blinks dark spots out of her eyes, scanning the street below. Her heartbeat throbs in her neck, like she’s about to swallow her own heart.

_A white face, a suit, gaunt limbs, blurred motion like she is seeing something no human should ever see—_

Nothing.

She catches a flicker of motion out of the corner of her eye—“ _Hhh-“_ , she gasps, almost choking on her breath—and it’s only the stray cat from down the street.

“God,” she breathes out. She sinks, shaking, to the floor and presses her back against the wall. “God, god, oh my god, oh my god—“ in a litany of shock. What do you say when you are so scared you don’t know what to think? She covers her face with her hands and digs the heels of her palms into her eye sockets. Some part of her knows she should be trying to steady her breathing but she can’t bring herself to control her body’s rapid panting.

_She can’t live like this_. She will shake herself apart one day, like some child’s toy worn out from being flung over and over again at a wall.

Steph feels something dripping over her lip and she screams, flinging herself away from the window and heaving panicked breaths in and out. “No,” she sobs. “No, no, please, not again—”

Shaking hands touch her nose, pull away. No red. No blood. Just gross snot dripping from her nose and fuck, Steph, are you a fucking baby or what? Some asshole sends a picture with weird binary and you have a whole panic attack about it? Pipe the fuck down before neighbors get suspicious and call the fucking cops and wouldn’t that be a treat, having more cops back in your life asking more questions you don’t have answers to—and oh! Let’s plan on having fun explaining what triggered _this_ to Lara on your next appointment, you fucking—

_Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupid—_

She finds herself hunched under the table, back pressed up against the wall and chair legs. She is somewhere in and out of her body, part of her numbly ignoring the heaving of her lungs and the saltwater dripping down her face and the other part of her screaming in rage and fear without her vocal cords.

Painstakingly, Steph takes the time to slowly turn into a person again. _She is not a person she is something screaming forever and ever—_ no, she is Stephanie Adler and she is twenty-one years old god only twenty-one years old how come she feels like she’s been here for centuries and centuries—what would Lara do?

Deep breath.

She drags in air. Lungs wheeze and she almost chokes. She takes another one. And another. Slowly. Her fingers tangle in the hem of her ratty pajama shirt as she forces herself to slow down when all she wants to do is run and scream and hurt things.

She stretches out her fingers and counts each one. Ten. Scratched up nail polish on her thumb. Bits of screenprinting ink on her palms. Then her toes, in socks her brother got her for her birthday two years ago. Yes. This is her too.

Yes.

She doesn’t want to scream anymore. She just wants to sleep, and not have to think about things anymore.

Slowly, painfully, like reeling in a net, Steph puts herself back together. She wipes her face on her shirt—gross, she needs a new one now, better do laundry tomorrow. She uncurls herself from under the table and her knees creak. She stands up on shaky legs and drinks some water.

She doesn’t look at the window. She knows there’s nothing there. There can’t be anything there. This is just another weird joke.

Her phone pings again. Idly, slowly, like she’s nursing a wound, she picks it up and swipes through.

The same Instagram account. Again, a single picture.

Steph sees the house across the street, the faintest distorted hint of a black suit and red tie, and then she sees nothing at all but the merciful black of unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [tumblr](https://thethinginthetrees.tumblr.com)


	8. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> New faces abound.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about that month-long hiatus! I got slam-dunked into MP100 fic hell, then slam-dunked into election hell, and then I looked up and realized a month had passed and I left you all on a bit of a cliffie. Hopefully this chapter makes up for it!

She misses classes for an entire week. She doesn’t know how she still has her job—it’s by pure luck a coworker was able to pick up her shifts.

She eats when she remembers to be hungry. The smell of cooked meat makes her want to vomit. She doesn’t shower—she can’t bear to hear the sound of running water.

The last time she felt this utterly hopeless was almost two years ago, when the Man told her to burn down everything she had left. She couldn’t even get that right.

Lara calls her when she misses one of their appointments without calling in advance. Steph rolls over in bed and watches the screen light up, then go to voicemail.

“Hey Steph,” says Lara’s tinny voice from the phone’s speaker. “It’s not super like you to miss an appointment without giving me a head’s-up, so I just wanted to reach out and check in on you. I hope you’ve been doing your exercises! Call me back when you get the chance.”

Steph closes her eyes to her voice and falls back into that quiet darkness.

The next day—afternoon, maybe? she has no concept of time anymore—she opens her eyes to see light slanting through the curtains and her stomach growling. She drags herself out of bed and goes to look in the fridge, ignoring her phone lying near-dead on the floor. Empty save for a bottle of juice and a solitary egg. She grabs the juice and sits down on the floor. It’s cold on her skin and the bright sharp taste of the orange juice shocks her tongue.

Steph sits on the floor, watching the light creep further down the wall as she sips her juice, and starts thinking seriously about that egg.

She eats the egg. Fries it but she doesn’t have cooking oil or butter so it’s just hot almost-burnt egg. She opens the window to let out the hot-egg smell. It’s mid-spring and the air has just a nip of cold.

It’s not good, but it stops her stomach from grumbling. Tomorrow she needs to go get groceries.

_Today she ate something_ , she tells herself. That was her task for today. Tomorrow, she will leave her apartment and get food. That’s all.

Maybe she’ll really just go crazy today and call Lara.

Steph looks at her phone and has a split-second moment where she swears she sees the same glitched photo on the screen.

Maybe not.

She showers, though, and she takes that as another win. Water sluices down her face and she takes deep breaths, telling herself that now, she is safe, and right now, that’s enough.

_Repetition_ , she thinks. _That’s_ _good_ _enough_.

She goes back to sleep with her hair wet. She plugs her phone in to charge and leaves it at that for the night. She’s not about to push the sudden burst of motivation any further.

She wakes up again at about 4am. Too early to go anywhere—not even the shitty Wal-mart two bus stops away would be open. She pulls out her phone—98% charged—and starts making a shopping list, studiously ignoring the voicemail notification in the corner.

_-eggs_

_-bread_

_-more juice_

_-some fucking vegetables (lettuce? potato, tomato, cukes) and fruit (oranges!!!, bana, graps?)_

_-more paint (esp white, black, purple, blue)_

_-_

She can’t stop thinking about that picture. He was there, wasn’t he? She wasn’t just…freaking out over two weird puzzle pictures in a row, right?

She knows it’s a bad idea. She knows she’s just had one marginally better day after five straight-up terrible days and she’s still riding that high.

Steph has never been good at thinking twice about things.

She swipes to Instagram and looks at the picture again, steeling herself again for the suit, the blank face, the gaunt lanky limbs.

She wasn’t imagining it. Clear as day, there is a red tie and a black suit, a glitched blank face, inhumanly tall. She takes deep breaths, fighting desperately against the instinct that wants her to shrink her lungs and run. _It’s a picture_ , she tells herself. _She hasn’t sensed the Man in almost two years. It’s okay_.

Just like the last picture, there’s binary in the corner, in terrible low-contrast dark red against the black. She finds that binary-to-text converter again and, squinting her eyes against the glare of the screen, types in the code.

_It seems you’re a creature of_

She frowns at the screen. She would almost guess the rest of the message was cut off, were it not for the fact that the third column of binary was left purposefully blank. _Creature of—_ She can’t tell if this is a threat, or some sort of cryptic clue, or an insult.

She shrugs to herself. It’s now—she checks the time—4:27am and she hasn’t felt the Man’s presence in twenty-two months, one week, and four days. Someone is clearly just trying to fuck with her. And if that’s not the case—if the Man is genuinely after her again and there’s proxies sending her messages in binary and she’s really in danger—fuck it. She’s done running. She spends her days painting, going to class, and working in a library where maybe two people talk to her. She has nothing to lose, no one close to her that she could inadvertently endanger. She’s not a vector anymore. If she dies—she fucking dies. At least then things would be over.

After her grocery run, she takes the bus in to the design building. She promises herself that if she still feels okay and up for going to class, she’ll go, and if she feels even the slightest bit terrible she’ll get on the next bus heading back to her apartment and watch Face Off for the rest of the day.

When the stop arrives, she’s one of maybe three people getting off the bus (Princeton is not known for its art program). An overwhelming wave of déjà vu hits her as she pulls open the heavy door (pale skin against dark metal, the light as it glares against the glass).

Steph thinks about two good things that she can name off the top of her head and starts walking down the winding halls to the studio, bag thumping against her back.

One: that orange juice really did hit different after a week of depressive funk.

Two:

Two:

Two: she is allowed to be proud of herself for functioning on the baseline of a normal human being. That’s okay. Lara would be proud of her.

A shoulder bumps into her and she flinches, still half-caught up in her thoughts.

“Oh, I’m so sorry!” A hand touches her shoulder, helping her regain her balance. “You okay? I didn’t see you there, I was in such a rush—”

“I’m okay,” she says. Her voice is rough and craggly from lack of use .

The other girl peers at her for a moment and Steph almost reflexively squares up. She’s pretty—the kind of girl-next-door straight-A wholesome American pretty that in Steph’s experience has almost always meant passive-aggressively mean. “Oh!” says the girl. “You’re Steph, right? I work across from you in studio.”

Steph looks closer at her. A hamsa on a necklace glints around her neck and blue eyes look inquisitively back at her. “Oh right,” she says slowly. “I thought you looked familiar. I’m sorry, I don’t—when I’m in studio I just—”

“Get into the zone, yeah, I feel that.” Jessa checks the time on her phone and grimaces. “You’re heading there too, right? I can walk with you—we’ve got like 2 minutes till class starts.”

They end up being a solid thirty minutes late since they get sidetracked one too many times—Jessa knows someone who works in the pottery wing of the building and _also_ coincidentally how to pick locks and they spend a little too long ooh-ing and aah-ing at all the in-progress pieces locked up in cases—but Steph can’t find it in herself to mind.

She doesn’t like people, generally. That’s a rule she’s accepted about herself—in her experience, people generally prefer to ignore her at best and at worst notice that something Bad is following her and start getting on her case about it—and usually that works to her benefit. The less people she gets attached to, the less likely the Man will see them as targets to hurt her with.

But Jessa—Jessa is something else. Steph has never before in her life met someone so gently and unobtrusively determined to get what she wants and it’s almost a superpower of hers. Her first sight of that implacable determination came when they got to the classroom and Jessa, without skipping a beat, moved her easel right beside Steph and kept chatting away at her even as Steph wholly expected her to go right back to ignoring her like everyone else does.

As time goes on, she keeps seeing that determination again and again. It awes her—here is someone who simply Does Not Stop until she gets what she wants and she does it in the kindest way possible.

“I’ve made a friend,” she tells Lara three weeks after she and Jessa met for the first time.

“Oh?” says Lara. “Tell me about her.”

Steph does, and it takes her far too long to realize Lara is smiling at her. “What?” she says.

“You seem happy,” Lara says. “It just makes me happy, that’s all. I’m your therapist, I’m allowed to be happy when you’re happy.”

Steph is happy? She hasn’t thought about it.

Steph is happy, just a little, and she curls around that little piece of happiness like it’s a candleflame she’s keeping alight against the wind. The world is cold and the pictures keep coming, but this is good and sweet, like honey candy and peaches, and she defends it fiercely

It’s selfish. Of course it is—every second that Jessa is around her she brings her closer and closer to danger. But Steph is weak. Maybe this time it’ll be different. She’s been alone for so long.

“Do you want to get coffee or something?” Jessa asks after studio one evening.

“Coffee?” Steph laughs at her a little as she rinses off her brushes in the sink. “Jessa, it’s like—” she checks her phone—“9pm. I won’t be able to sleep.”

Jessa shrugs. “Dinner. Whatever. I got paid today and I feel like we never hang out and you’re cool. I like hanging out with you.”

Steph can feel a smile pulling at the corner of her mouth. “Ha, gross,” she says. “I like hanging out with you too.”

She feels like she’s back in middle school or something.

“Cool,” says Jessa. “You been to Hoagie Haven before? I know one of the guys who cooks there and he does a _banging_ kosher Phat Lady and you gotta try it, I’m gonna order it just for you.”

Steph genuinely can’t remember the last time she went out at all, let alone with someone else.

Jessa’s right, as she usually is. The sandwich _smacks_.

Still riding the high of successfully going somewhere with another person at night without anything terrible happening, she invites Jessa back to her shitty little studio to hang out. It’s Friday! She doesn’t want to kill herself! It’s a good evening.

“ _Please_ let me do an e-girl makeover on you,” Steph says. She’s not drunk, not really, but she feels happy and giggly, like she’s actually living her age. “I’ll make you TikTok-famous, I promise, you would look so _cute_.”

Jessa laughs at her as she fumbles with her keys. “TikTok clout,” she says. “All I’ve ever wanted.”

“I’m serious,” Steph says, and she finally manages to unlock her door. “I have a pretty decent following, I can get you there.”

“Sure,” she says, still laughing a little. “Love e-girls. Love e-girls and their ahee-gaow.”

“Every day you hurt me,” Steph deadpans and pushes her ahead of her. “I never want you to say anything about that ever again.”

Jessa does make a cute e-girl. Steph’s hands shake a little as she dots blush on her cheekbones and over the bridge of her nose. She doesn’t think about why because she physically cannot handle that while she is this close to her.

She edits it the next day, cringing the entire time at how obviously sloshed they are, but it comes out cute. About an hour after it posts, she’s inundated with a flood of “girl in red” comments, so clearly she doesn’t edit it that well.

Maybe they have a point, she thinks. The drunk bi energy was indeed off the charts, and even after hours of editing she couldn’t filter it out.

Steph thinks about last night, carefully painting lip gloss over Jessa’s lips, and swallows hard. _Of course_ , she thinks ironically, _the one person she finally allows herself to be friends with_ has _to be the source of a misplaced crush_.

Her and her Cancer Venus. She can’t repress every single social emotion for literally a decade and expect her psyche to rebound like an elastic band. She should have known this would catch up to her.

Steph has a feeling it’s unhealthy—surely it can’t be the best for her to get this closely attached to the first person she’s talked to in the span of two years. She can’t bring herself to care, though. Weird shit happens near-daily—weird images getting DM-ed to her, movement out of the corner of her eye, noises that wake her up in a muddle in the middle of the night. If she doesn’t get a nosebleed or a pressure headache, she refuses to worry about it. She can be just as stubborn and determined as whoever’s fucking with her.

One evening they’re staying late in the studio with a promise to their TA that they’ll make sure they’ll lock up when they’re done. Steph has convinced a rare ugly laugh out of Jessa with a bad, mean imitation of the self-confident assistant and she almost drops her brush on her canvas.

“Jesus, Steph,” she laughs. “You’re too much.”

Steph smiles at her and drips more purple paint onto her palette. “You know you love me,” she jokes. “I give you clout and you repay me like this?”

“That’s true,” Jessa says. “My follower count spiked when you dropped my Insta.”

“You’re welcome.” She thinks about getting another brush dirty, then thinks _fuck it_ and just dips her whole hand in.

“Interesting technique.”

“Shut up.”

Jessa huffs and bumps against her, dabbling a finger in the paint. “You good?” Steph asks, half joking.

“Feels nice,” she says, then slaps a whole handful of purple paint at her face.

Steph screeches and ducks away. Her hand lands right next to the paintbrush wash water and she flings it right at her.

It scores a direct hit. Jessa is soaked and she freezes, spitting paint water-drenched hair out of her mouth.

Steph freezes too.

They stare at each other in a stalemate before Steph catches Jessa’s hand creeping toward the tube of acrylic paint. “Jessa—“ she gasps out but before she can say anything else paint is being flung at her face.

They end up on the floor with half their collective paint supply around them—thank goodness both of them are broke college students and don’t shell out for fancy paints. Steph is laughing so hard she’s legitimately light-headed. Next to her, Jessa isn’t much better. She posts up on one arm, laughing helplessly as she smudges streaks of blue off of her neck.

“Fuck,” Steph says. “We gotta clean this shit up.” She looks up at Jessa and the light streams down around her like a halo. She has that weird feeling that this is a moment that will stay with her—Jessa, cursing as she laughs, picking bits of crusted paint out of her hair, and she, on the floor, looking up at her.

“Ah, you got some paint on your face,” Jessa says, and easy as anything she licks her finger and scrubs it across Steph’s cheekbone.

Steph freezes. Her skin tingles where Jessa touched her and she looks away, heart thudding in her chest.

“And who’s fault is that?” Steph sits up and scrubs her face with her shirt. She can’t look at her right now. She _can’t_.

Instead of answering the question, Jessa stands, avoiding the puddle of greyish-green washwater on the floor, and looks at Steph’s canvas. “Oh,” she says, and she sounds dismayed. “Oh, Steph, I’m sorry—paint got all over your canvas.”

Steph stands too and peers over her shoulder at her canvas. Instead of the purple-blue-grey color scheme she was thinking of, her landscape got covered with vivid spatters of Jessa’s cerulean and orange, nearly obscuring her faint pencil markings.

“I’m so sorry,” says Jessa, and she looks so guilty Steph wants to rub the worry lines off of her face with her hand. “Can you salvage it? I can buy you a new canvas, I’m so sorry—"

“Nah,” says Steph. “Don’t worry about it. It looks kind of nice.”

* * *

The pictures don’t stop. She can’t think of what else to do except make sure her door is locked every night and that she carries a pocketknife. She lives on the fourth floor—it’s not like anyone can break in through a window or anything—and there are security cameras everywhere. No matter how many times she blocks the account, another one just springs up in its place.

She’s usually able to put them out of her mind, but when she gets a picture of the inside of her room she’s, understandably, a little more freaked-out than she usually is. 

That’s _her_. Sitting on the shitty couch _she_ picked out from the street, in her fucking underwear because it’s getting warmer and her shitty fucking landlord doesn’t want to turn on the AC. How did they get up there? She’s sixty feet up and there aren’t even any trees around to climb!

“This is fucked,” Steph says out loud. “This is _fucked!_ What does this person want from me!” She makes like, $600 a month tops from adrev—it’s not even like she has anything good to steal in her apartment. The Man isn’t around anywhere—it _has_ to be just one person fucking with her, but _why?_ For what reason? She isn’t even interesting—all she does is go to classes and work, then home, then maybe sometimes hang out with the one person who genuinely likes her.

Right now she doesn’t even _want_ to know what the four letters on the bottom corner says but she resigns herself to not sleeping that night and feeds it into the a1z26 decoder.

_Soon_.

Soon? That’s fucking ominous.

She’s almost happy to see it, in a fucked way. She’s so _sick_ of waiting around, and maybe it’s just that Jessa makes her bold, but she’s almost scrapping for a fight. Part cockiness over having made one (1) friend, part fatalistic “if it’s going to happen, it might as well be now” aggression.

She keeps doing what she’s always done. She keeps her head down. Goes to class. Makes art when she can.

She feels like she’s in the eye of the storm. Has been for two years now. Behind her and in front of her is storms and flooding and fire, and right now she’s in that wavering truce between her and the unstoppable force of nature.

The painting of her family is coming along slowly, but well. When she sketches in her mother’s face and adds color with the nice gouache paint she’s been saving up for, she cries. She curses and dabs at her eyes, praying none of her tears got on the paint. When she looks back at the canvas, she sees her mother looking back at her. When she gets herself under control again, she adds in the details—the mole under her lips, the way her hair would curl along her temple, the feathering of the crows-feet at her eyes. With her brother, it’s much the same—that grin, his freckles, the one crooked tooth braces were never able to straighten out.

It hurts, in a good way. It’s a good and healthy distraction and she’s proud of herself.

Lara says it’s good to set short-term goals for herself. Steph would never tell her, but her short-term goal right now is to finish this painting before whatever is following her finishes _her_. The fact that she’s instantly categorized this as a short-term rather than a long-term goal says enough.

She’s altogether probably not as worried as she should be (even though _someone somehow got a picture of her in her fourth-floor apartment_ ) until something starts whispering in her closet.

The first time, she thinks it’s just her neighbor across the hall, talking just a little too loud for 2 in the AM. She covers her ears and goes back to sleep.

The second time, she thinks she’s dreaming. It wouldn’t be the first time she’s experienced half-dream, half-awake hallucinations. She goes back to sleep again.

The third time, she throws her covers aside and stands up because she _knows_ her neighbor is asleep and she also knows her dream-hallucination-things never repeat. She fumbles for her phone, charging by her bed, and turns on the flashlight. She waits for her eyes to adjust to the bright light, listening hard to the murmuring coming from the closet. It’s indistinct—too muffled to make out a gender, let alone the words it was saying. The cadence sounds like English, but that’s all she can glean.

As an afterthought, she grabs the heavy metal water bottle on her bedstand, hefting it until it sits comfortably in her hand. It could be a recording, she thinks, left by the same person sending her the weird images.

Or something could be in there.

Quietly, she crosses the few feet between her bed and the closet, listening intently for a break in the whispered words. She stands with her hand poised over the door handle, hesitates for just a second, then pulls it open in one fluid movement.

She screams.

The person—no, the _thing_ —in the closet. It’s not human. It’s semi-human, she can see intelligence in its glistening wet eyes, and it disgusts her as much as it horrifies her. It looks like—its skin is pale, like the sun has never touched it, and her phone’s flashlight shines wetly off of its pallid skin. And its face—there’s something wrong with it, it bulges _out_ like a dog, a muzzle protruding from a human face, with fangs that click against each other as it hisses out words, words that this close to it she can now understand.

_“Stephanie Adler, twenty-one years old, born to Miriam Adler and older sister of Andrew Adler. You will love and lose over and over again and you will watch from afar as those you love self-immolate like pine trees going up in flames. On your twenty-second birthday you will be happier than you ever thought possible but on your twenty-third—”_

The insidious, slithering sound of its voice snaps her out of her shock. She swings at it, hard, with her bottle, putting all of her strength into it. “Get _out_ ,” she snarls, “of my fucking closet, freak!”

It _laughs_ at her, lolling a long red tongue out like a dog, and ducks easily. It lunges at her and she flinches away, unable to react in time. It’s wiry, strong like a feral dog, and knocks her over. She lands hard on the floor, winded, and it hisses in her face. She bares her teeth back at it, weapon knocked out of her hand, her only light source still clutched in her other hand.

“ _You’re marked_ ,” says the thing. “ _The other one wants you. But I can still have a taste_.”

She shrieks in disgust and with strength she didn’t know she had, dislodges its grip on her forearm and slams her phone into the side of its misshapen head.

It flinches a bit and scuttles backwards into the closet, moving like something that had once been bipedal but learned long ago to move on four limbs. It’s only after it’s disappeared into the shadows that she realizes its long, sharp nails bit and dragged into her skin, leaving long, ugly gashes.

It doesn’t hurt yet and she picks up her water bottle again, distantly pleased that her phone still works even after bludgeoning a monster. Cautiously, she ventures forward, scanning her light through her clothes.

Empty.

She touches the back wall, peers into the corners and examines every single flaw and imperfection in the walls of the closet, looking for something, _anything_ that could hide a hidden door or passage.

Nothing at all. The thing had disappeared as if it were never here. As if it were a dream.

She shuts the door and goes to sit back down on her bed. As if on cue, the gashes on her arms begin to throb. 

It _hurt_ her, she realizes, staring numbly at the gashes on her arms. The Man _never_ touched her. The people and places around her were fair game, sure, but he never physically harmed her further than the headaches, nausea, and nosebleeds. This is something else.

Too shocky and numb to do anything but obey the weird dream-logic this night has taken, she wraps her arms in an old T-shirt and goes back to sleep.

The next morning, she wakes up to blood all over her sheets, makeshift bandages scabbed to her arms, and the sinking feeling that all of this is starting up again.

Steph says a very heartfelt “ _Fuck!_ ” and goes to disinfect her cuts.

For the first time in a long time, her home is not a sanctuary. She would think it was a dream, if not for the nasty cuts sure to scar that litter her arms. She spends the morning pushing the shelves from the living room area across the closet door, and then the bookcase and whatever furnishings she could spare and easily move. She doesn’t know if that will hold whatever that was back—it seemed abnormally strong last night, although that could just have been her own panic talking.

_It’s not the Man_ , she reasons as she hops on the shuttle to the library. She wants to spend as little time as possible in her apartment. _The Man has a different vibe—creeping paranoia, subtle physical pain. This is overt. Except—_

What had the thing said? She was _marked._

That was no news to her—the Man had followed her for ages.

_But he’s not following her now_ , reasons a voice in her head. _Maybe not ever again—_

She cuts that line of thought off quickly. That’s too optimistic, even now.

Jessa asks her about the bandages covering her arms. Steph gives her a half-hearted lie about the stray cat down the street and a poorly-timed pet, but she can tell it doesn’t land. Her eyes turn sad and she attempts a smile as Steph pulls the studio door open for her. She doesn’t bother correcting the unspoken assumption Jessa makes, even as guilt weighs even heavier on her shoulders. The less she knows, the better.

She goes back to her apartment only to sleep, and even that in sparse six-hour chunks. Even so, the whispers continue. Every now and then, she catches distinct words in the flow of murmurs. Her name. Lara. Jessa, even. Places she’s never heard of before—Centralia, Fairmount, Memorytown.

Sometimes, the door rattles, as if something is trying to turn the handle from the inside. The shelves seem to hold, even though it wobbles alarmingly. Out of her hours she allots herself at home, overwhelmingly too much of it is spent staring, paranoid, at the closet. She feels like a dog barking up the wrong tree.

Things are getting bad again, and this she can’t will away simply by not thinking about it. This is physical. Up in her face. Visceral. She’s already twitchy from spending too long on sub-optimal sleep. Her art has shown a similar progression—she hasn’t touched the painting of her family in days, and every single rudimentary sketch in studio has Jessa looking over her shoulder and cracking some shitty ‘2 edgy 4 u’ joke.

The whispering is maddening. The constant fear of getting her throat gashed in is worse. The worst part of it is the unpredictability. With the Man, he followed a pattern. Headache, nosebleed, then as he orbits closer over days or weeks things start happening and people start getting hurt.

With this thing? One night, it’s silent. The next, whispers and bangs against the closet door as she sits up, sleepless, in her bed. The next week might be peaceful. Then it might push so aggressively against the door that the shelves wobble and she has to push against it, bracing as hard as she can, for hours.

[She livestreams a bit of it one night, when she’s tired enough for that to seem pretty funny.](https://thethinginthetrees.tumblr.com/post/634556173561069568/bruh/) That night’s a good one for an audience—plenty of banging, plenty of whispering she hopes comes through from her phone’s microphone. Nothing too terrible. Relatively speaking.

Half the comments she gets are the “are you good why are you streaming this” kind. The other half are the meta “ah hell yeah I’ve been waiting for a stream that’s just someone kicking a door” comments. A few rare comments defy math and comment on the surprisingly realistic SFX work on the scars on her arms.

During math class, she Googles “pale humanoid monster whispers sleep”. After combing through more than a few returns for ASMR (pale humanoid monster ASMR?), she stumbles across the legend of the Rake. The picture on the wiki is low-quality, but it still makes her shudder. That’s it—the pale, slick skin and the sunken eyes.

Inhumanely strong. Somewhat prescient. Feral. No known weaknesses.

She very quietly puts her head down on her desk in the back of the room and stays like that till they get dismissed.

There’s nothing she can do. No one she can call—how can she explain a creature that appears in her closet at night, then disappears without a trace come daybreak? A TikTok livestream is not proof.

The next day after stocking up on supplies for a one-person Seder she takes the bus out to a local REI to see if she can pick up some sort of weapon or tool she could use defensively, if it comes to that. She spends far too long looking at the different lengths of hunting knives and camping blades—long enough that an employee comes by to discreetly keep an eye on her. She needs reach—she doesn’t want to be closer than she has to to that thing—but she needs weight too. She can’t afford to rely on her strength alone—she needs something that can do some heavy-duty damage.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees a hatchet. The kind a YA protagonist would get before being stranded in the wilderness. She reaches up, standing on her tiptoes to get it. The weight feels good in her hands. It’s balanced well, and it easily extends her reach by a foot.

When she runs her fingers over the wood shaft, for a split second she feels scars, battle marks, gashes that have been smoothed over through countless iterations of fingers polishing and rubbing. Then it is smooth once more.

She buys it and keeps it in her lap the entire ride back to her apartment. When she gets home, she puts the hatchet on her bedside table. It feels familiar in a weird way. It makes her feel better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Full disclosure: I have this fic written out for 13-ish more chapters, but I'll be shifting to a once-monthly update schedule to give myself more than enough leeway to stockpile work. Always on Tumblr [here!](https://www.a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com/) The amount of interaction and comments and asks I get about this Does directly influence my writing speed, promise!


	9. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A tipping point is reached.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for canon-typical injuries :)

On the same evening as the first unmarked envelope comes, the thing finally breaks through the door.

She finds the envelope when she comes home for her few hours of sleep (rather, her few hours of staring at the door whether it’s silent or not, and maybe catching a bit of rest in between). It must have been slid under her door—she almost steps on it when she unlocks her door. It has no address on it—not even her name. But it has the same symbol drawn on it as her profile picture on every single one of her social media accounts—a stylized eye, with a single teardrop below it.

Steph is two seconds away from just throwing it in the recycling bin—surely if someone or some _thing_ needs her attention that badly, they would tell it to the thing whispering secrets in her closet. But the fact that they chose to use her avatar, her symbol, instead of her name—that’s different. Another break in the pattern. Another twist they decided to throw at her.

_Why not!_ She thinks to herself. _Why not,_ and opens the envelope.

A piece of printer paper, torn along the edge. Three words in black—ugh, Comic Sans.

_Wrestle. Liberty. Umbrella._

And a string of numbers and letters: _X0° X2’X1.6X2” N, 7X° 42’1.87X” W_.

She frowns and feels around in the envelope. It’s empty.

She checks the piece of paper again. Just the words and the jumbled numbers and letters. Except—

The back has an unfamiliar symbol, just barely drawn in pale pencil lines.

Four arrows. In a square. Pointing down and into the center.

It looks familiar—she just can’t place it. A mutual’s avatar, maybe? A logo she’s seen before?

It’s not important. Just another cryptic clue left for her to puzzle over.

When base64, Caesar, and the other basic ciphers she can think of don’t yield anything interesting and Google has nothing pertinent to give her, she gives up and posts a picture of the envelope and paper to her Tumblr. She doesn’t have a huge following on there, but maybe the post will get picked up by the puzzle-breaking nerds out there.

She dumps her bag on her bed and changes as quickly as possible—she doesn’t want to be anywhere near the closet when night falls. She eats some toast—the letter won’t leave her mind and she doesn’t want to cook, not when she _knows_ she’s seen that image before and that code won’t leave her head.

As night falls outside, she follows her usual routine—the only break in pattern being instead of sitting down on the bed to edit videos or sketch, she opens her laptop and keeps digging for ciphers.

At about 10:30pm she decides to cut her losses and try to get some sleep. The knocking hasn’t started yet. Maybe tonight will be quiet, and she’ll be able to sleep for more than thirty minutes at a stretch.

She flicks off the lights and pulls the covers up. The hatchet is within easy reach, lying in the space between her bedframe and the mattress. With every cell in her body straining toward that door, she finds somewhere between sleep and wakefulness to float in until dawn.

Sometime later—it could have been minutes or hours—she wakes up.

Steph lies awake in the dark, eyes unseeing in the shadows. She can hear the sound of her own breath. What woke her up?

She listens intently, lying perfectly still.

Nothing.

But then.

Something scratches its nails down her door.

The thing taps on the wall again. Drums its nails against it like it’s bored.

Silence again. Long enough for her eyelids to grow heavy again.

She must have lost time again. That’s the only explanation she can think of. Because the next time she opens her eyes, it is because she can feel the mattress dip and the Rake is crouching over her chest.

It is only sheer petrifying terror that stops her from screaming. It is so close to her face that she can feel its hot, rancid breath on her skin. Its eyes glint even in pitch darkness, evil little pinpricks of light piercing right through her. She can feel its claws (fingernails?) scraping gently up and down her arms, its weight heavy on her torso, pinning her to the bed.

She struggles to keep her breathing the same, but it’s no matter. It knows she’s awake. A mockery of a grin spreads over its muzzle-face and it begins whispering again.

_“In two years, six months, and four days you will be running and running and running with nowhere to take you in. Everyone will turn their faces from you. You will be burdened—”_

It keeps _whispering_. With every word, adrenaline screams louder in her head that this is not something she’s meant to hear.

She breathes shallowly, feeling the weight of the creature sink further down against her with every exhale. She keeps her eyes fixed on the tiny pinhole eyes and she slowly, achingly, twists her hand to the side. Her hatchet lies just out of reach—if she can set herself up to grab it as she shifts her weight to the side, then maybe—

_“Your child will never know a normal life_ ,” says the Rake, lolling its tongue out in a dog-laugh.

Steph twists her body to the side, howling as its claws bite into her arms, and forces her fingers around the shaft of the hatchet. They fall off the bed in a tangle of limbs and she comes up on top this time, pushing it down with the force of her weight as she swings indiscriminately downward.

The creature gets its legs underneath her and _pushes_ against her ribcage. She’s sent sprawling backwards and hits her head against the wall with a crack, lungs heaving for air. Her fingers are tight around the hatchet even so, refusing to let go of her one weapon left to her.

The Rake unfurls itself, crouching like a deformed dog on its wrong-muscled limbs. It licks at a cut and bares its teeth at her.

“ _You are lucky you bear its mark_ ,” it hisses, and then it is gone.

Panting, grasping at oxygen like it’s a hand held out to her, Steph forces her fingers to unclench from around the hatchet. It clatters to the ground and she flinches at the racket. Her arms _burn_ where old cuts have been reopened and new gashes joined them, getting blood all over the carpet.

She wants to sob. She rushes to the bathroom and runs water over them, cursing near-hysterically as the water stings and burns. Under the flow, she tests her range of motion—clench one fist, then the other. Move the fingers, then the wrists. No tendons were severed but it hurts to hold things. She can barely shut the water off, let alone muster up the presence of mind and physical steadiness to bandage herself up. She catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, so pale that the dark circles under her eyes look like bruises, that the snakebite piercings under her lip look like droplets of blood. She looks away, shaking.

Carrying the rudimentary first aid kit she picked up at Target, she turns on the light in her room and stops in shock. Somehow, in the fight she had missed her barricade of shelves toppling to the floor, sending art supplies and books everywhere. The room looks like the set of a bad horror flick, stray papers everywhere, rumpled bloodstained sheets, and a hatchet.

She drops the first aid kit and sits down abruptly on the floor, lightheaded. Blood is beginning to seep sluggishly from the cut wounds again.

She doesn’t know what to do.

She watches from afar as her hands pick up her phone and swipe through to her contacts. Her thumb presses ‘Call’ under Jessa’s name.

It rings for an unbearably long amount of time. It’s loud in the silent apartment.

“Steph?” Jessa’s voice is tinny through the speakers, but even so she can tell she woke her up. “Steph, it’s like 4am, what—are you okay?”

Steph starts and realizes she has control of her body again. “Jessa,” she says. “Oh shit, fuck, I’m sorry, I woke you up—it’s not important, I’m sorry, I—”

“Whoa, hold on.” She hears rustling, like she’s sitting up in bed. “You okay? It’s not like you to call this late, are you sure it’s not important? Do you want me to come over?”

_She wants to go home_ , Steph realizes, but home’s been gone a long time now.

She doesn’t realize she’s crying, slow quiet tears running down her face, until Jessa says “I’m coming over. It’ll be like ten minutes—don’t go anywhere, okay? Stay on the line.”

“I’m sorry,” Steph whispers. She feels like she’s a child again, sick and confused and wanting someone to tell her what to do.

“You don’t have anything to apologize for.” Jessa sounds like she’s rushing, the call interrupted by bursts of static as she gets dressed and out the door. “Are you hurt? Can I bring you anything?”

“No—yes—I’m sorry,” she says again. She’s shivering. “I’m cold. My arms hurt. I’m in my room.” She can’t think straight.

“Your arms hurt, okay.” Steph can hear the sound of her car starting up and a snatch of radio playing before Jessa turns it off. “Steph, can you tell me what happened to your arms?”

“Nnnn—” The words don’t want to come out. Distantly, she knows that she can’t tell Jessa what happened. It’ll hurt her, somehow. She can’t bring her into this.

“Okay.” Jessa’s voice is soothing, even through the phone, something her mind recognizes as safe. “It’s okay, we can cross that bridge when we get to it. Can you breathe with me?”

“Uh huh.” She exhales shakily and breathes in, matching Jessa’s count.

“Good,” says Jessa. “I’m almost there. Stay on the call with me, okay?”

“Yeah.” She keeps breathing. She doesn’t look at her arms. She doesn’t want to make it worse.

Someone knocks on the door and she flinches. “Steph?” Jessa calls through the door. “It’s me. Can you let me in?”

It takes so much effort to rise to her feet again. Her muscles feel leaden, like clay, and she has to work to animate them again. She gets to the door okay, but grasping the knob and turning inward to open it hurts like a bitch.

When Jessa takes a good look at her her eyes widen in concern for just a second before she pulls herself back under control again. “I’m glad I brought my first aid kit,” she says before pushing past her into the apartment. “Sit on the couch—you look so pale I don’t want you on your feet.”

Steph gladly follows her direction, sinking heavily down to the couch and resting her hands in her lap. Jessa kneels in front of her, setting the first aid kit on the floor and gently turning her arms so she can see the lacerations.

“How are you so good at this?” Steph whispers.

Jessa flashes a smile up at her as she rips open a package of sterile gauze. “Last semester I shadowed a nurse doing rounds,” she says. “This semester I took a street medic course. I’ve been getting _very_ accustomed to working with hurt people in shock.”

Steph looks away as Jessa carefully cleans the wounds with antiseptic ointment and wraps her arms, tight enough to slow the bleeding. She must have spaced out in between Jessa leaving to wash her hands and coming back, because when she blinks again, Jessa is sitting next to her.

She reaches out towards her face. Steph barely stops herself from flinching. Jessa’s hand feels warm against her skin. Jessa frowns. “You’re cold,” she says.

“You’re warm,” Steph says weakly.

Jessa goes to rummage around for a blanket. When she returns, blanket slung around her shoulders, the frown on her face has worsened. “Steph,” she says. “I don’t want to freak you out but your room looks like it’s been torn apart. I don’t want to push you, but if someone’s hurting you I would really like to know.”

Steph feels a bitter grin creep up her face. Her arms throb in time with her heart and she is tired—physical exhaustion muddling her thoughts, mental exhaustion from shock and years and years of battling these things alone.

She makes a poor decision.

“Jessa,” she says. “Did I tell you what happened to my family?”

She tells her everything. Every single thing. From how she used to draw the Man pictures as a kid, up until his attention became a danger and he began to hurt the people around her. Even her silence—how with every Instagram or Tumblr or TikTok DM she ignores, she has damned another person in order to keep herself safe. Even worse, the rage. The fury at how, somehow, her pain and guilt and exhaustion and fear make it okay for others to come to her for help. As if she could help them. As if she _wanted_ to help them, even after everything she had lost.

Her throat is getting sore by the time she gets to the Rake, how it told her she’s _marked_ , somehow, and someone is sending her codes and cryptic clues and pictures carefully designed to turn her into a conspiracy theorist flinching at shadows.

She can’t look at her while she speaks. She can’t watch her face change from confusion to shock or disgust or, worse, pity as she starts to realize Steph’s fighting with a monster that doesn’t really exist.

When she finishes, she feels as if all of her is gutted and laid bare for judgement. She stares at her hands, her arms, neatly bandaged and taped by Jessa’s hands. She dares a look up at her.

Jessa is biting her lip. She’s gone pale and Steph feels guilt crushing down on her chest like the Rake is pinning her down again at how she has pulled her into danger out of pure selfishness.

“Steph,” she says. “Can I see that envelope? I have a hunch.”

Out of all the things for Jessa to say in response to Steph dragging every single skeleton out of her closet to show her, that was nowhere near what she’d expected.

“Yeah,” says Steph. “Uh, yeah, lemme grab it—”

Jessa’s hand on reflex clamps around her shoulder and pulls her back down on the couch. “Nope,” she says, popping the _p_. “Not a chance, bud. Sit back down and tell me where it is.”

It’s on her desk. Jessa finds it easily and flips to the back. Steph watches as the paper slips from her fingers and slowly drifts to the floor.

“Jessa?” Steph’s never seen her this shaken.

“I know this symbol.” She stoops and picks it up again. She sits heavily back down next to Steph and traces out the symbol with her fingers. Four arrows, pointing towards the center.

“How?” Steph asks. Foreboding drips into her bones.

“My boyfriend,” Jessa says. “He and his friends have a YouTube channel together and this is their avatar. Weird shit like this has been happening to them too.”

Maybe it’s the shock, maybe Steph is just dumb, but her piece-of-shit brain decides to focus in on _boyfriend_ and not _weird shit happens to them too_.

“Boyfriend?” she asks. She can feel the clown shoes getting measured for her already.

Jessa waves a hand absently. “Jeff, yeah, we met when I was doing rounds last semester. Anyways, he—”

“We’ve been friends for three months and I didn’t know you had a boyfriend?”

Jessa huffs at her. “It never came up, I guess. He’s very sweet, I think you would like him. But listen!” Her eyes flash and she leans in. “This is _exactly_ the kind of shit that’s happening with them. Weird letters and pictures they don’t remember taking. Things in their houses, freaking them out and they can’t explain it. I think you guys have a lot to talk over.”

Frankly, Steph is still reeling from the boyfriend thing, but she can’t help but feel a bit of…something. Hope?

Hope kills. She knows that. She feels the repercussions of hope in the weight of the guilt that lies on her shoulders, and in the foolish courage bleeding out onto Jessa’s bandages.

But even so.

She’s not the only one. She’s not alone.

“Sounds like I gotta make a collab,” says Steph.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :) boy time is coming up !! get ready !! as always i'm @a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com, feel free to come by and say hi, comments/kudos/asks always make my day! speaking of things that make my day [SHOUTOUT TO THIS SOME NIGHTS FANART BY @politicaldarkharvestcomics ON TUMBLR!!! ](https://politicaldarkharvestcomics.tumblr.com/post/635437117601923072/read-some-nights-on-ao3) it made me so happy i screamed into a pillow when i saw it LOOK AT MY BEAUTIFUL GIRLS!!! stunning art the serotonin boost is incredible tysm!!!


	10. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Unexpected allies (and enemies) in unexpected places.

“Hey, guys.” Jeez, this camera is shit for mobile vlogging—she should get a stabilizer or something. “Sorry about the unexpected livestream today—something came up.”

Her subscriber count is going to tank. Unless the people who followed her for SFX tutorials and e-girl-adjacent looks are also very into puzzle-solving and mildly terrifying livestreamed scavenger hunts.

“So, as some of you may or may not know—” Steph ducks under a low-hanging branch, nearly headbutting the camera in the process—“I’ve been getting some weird correspondence lately. Some weird DMs, which honestly, like, whatever since I get DMs all the time, but! Someone sent me a physical _letter_ —no address, no stamp, nothing but my avatar on the envelope. And inside it?”

A group of kids walk past her towards the entrance of the hiking trail, snickering at her camera. She pauses to narrow her eyes at them. “I’m still scared of middle schoolers,” she mutters. “Anyways, the only thing in it was a piece of paper with a weird symbol on one side and on the other side was this string of letters and numbers and three random words—it was like—fuck, uhh. . . wrestle, library, umbrella? Just totally nonsensical.”

The path is reasonably well-maintained—clearly marked and fairly free of overhanging branches or tripping hazards. Even so, there’s something about the nature of being deep in a forest that just scrambles her internal compass. Sound is muffled, and if it weren’t for the blazes every few feet she wouldn’t know where she was going. Off-camera, she checks to make sure her hatchet is discreetly looped onto her jeans.

“Anyways, I did some Googling and there’s a key that corresponds coordinates with strings of words? And the string of numbers corroborated the same place. And that’s where I am! Heading toward a random point on a hiking trail at—” she checks her phone—“7:47pm on a Saturday evening with no idea what I’m looking for or what I might find.”

She takes some time to scan the chat. _Steph_ , says one message. _Genuinely. Are you good._

“Am I good?” She pauses at a fork in the path and, after a few seconds of hesitation she takes the right path. “Great question, thank you so much. No!”

“I am so stressed! But like, I can’t die because a friend and I are going to watch the Sonic movie and the Cats movie in a back-to-back showing the moment finals are done and I refuse to die before we do that. Also—” she pans quickly down to the hatchet by her side—“it’s not like I’m going in defenseless.”

She grins at the prerequisite “What do you have? A _knife!_ NO” comments and keeps moving.

The coordinates start coming up and she starts looking in earnest. She doesn’t even know what to look for—a lockbox? Another envelope? A person, even?

She can’t see a thing. Not even a weird-looking boll or branch to poke at. It starts getting dark—the birds start singing in cacophony before the sun sets, and people start leaving the trail.

“Uh, I’m going to shut this off?” she says. “I’m going to save my battery just in case but if anything interesting happens, I’ll get it on video.”

The chat starts popping off—approximately eighty percent of the people in chat are worried she’s about to get snapped by Freddy fucking Krueger or something. “I’ll be fine,” she tells chat. “I’ll update you if anything interesting happens. Sleep well, beloveds. This is Damsel, signing off.”

She ends the stream and looks around. “Jeez,” she mutters to herself. “Shit’s fucking dark.”

If she dies in this forest, Jessa will kill her.

She turns on the flashlight and looks around. [Just more trees, looking the same in every single direction she faces.](https://thethinginthetrees.tumblr.com/post/638716466661818368/hmm/) She takes a deep breath, trying to stay calm. As long as she follows the blazes, she can get out. She just has to stay on the path.

A twig snaps. She breathes out.

That wasn’t her.

Her hand creeps to the hatchet by her side and she turns slowly, scanning the forest. Waiting for her flashlight to catch on a pale white face, or pinprick eyes glinting up at her from the undergrowth. “Come on,” she hisses through her teeth. Her hands are shaking and she wills the light to be steady. “Come on, fucker, get this over with.”

Something whispers behind her and she whips around. “ _You_ ,” she snarls. “I’ve just about had it with you, bud. Got my hatchet right here, you want another taste?”

Her flashlight catches on a glint and she draws her hatchet, advancing farther off the path towards it.

“Fuck!” says someone and she pulls back. “Fuck! Okay! Our bad!”

“What?” she says. “You can _talk?_ ”

“ _What?_ ”

Steph frowns. If this is yet another bad joke—”Who’s there?” she says, putting as much force into those words as she can. “Come out. Don’t fucking test me right now.”

She can overhear a brief discussion through the trees. “—we can take her, come on, there’s like three—” “—she has a fucking _axe_ , dude, I—” “Fuck it.”

A guy her age steps out of the woods and into her path of light, hands raised. He also looks like he’s filming, clutching a gimbal-stabilized phone in one hand. “Sorry we startled you,” he says. “That’s on us. Please put away the hatchet? We can talk this out, I promise.”

“How many of you are there?” she asks. She’s still wary, but she lowers the hatchet. This isn’t the danger she expected, but she’s not stupid.

“Two others,” he says. “Guys, come on.”

Two other guys step out of the woods and she narrows her eyes. All three of them look like they’d be more at home running a cozy Metal Gear Solid stream than tromping around in the woods past sundown. Although, she supposes, to be fair, she doesn’t quite look like a night hiker either.

“What are you doing here? Little late for a walk in the woods, isn’t it?” She loops the hatchet through the sheath again but keeps the flashlight on them. With any luck, their camera will be fucked up enough by the light that any footage of her face will be obscured.

“I could ask you the same thing,” says the first guy who stepped out of the shadows. “What are _you_ doing here?”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Answer my question,” she snaps. “I’ve been here for a while and it’s getting gross and I’m really not in the mood to play word games.”

“We—shit, hang on—we got a letter,” says one of them, the one with glasses and a scruffy beard. He fumbles in his pocket for a sec and pulls out a crumpled piece of paper. He holds it out to her and she takes it cautiously. When she looks at it, she can feel the blood drain from her face.

Same paper weight. Same shitty fucking Comic Sans. Same torn paper style.

Sure enough, when she flips to the back and squints at the faint pencil markings there, there is a drawing of an eye with a single tear drop. Her avatar.

“We figured out the string of letters actually _wasn’t_ a cipher, it corresponded to coordinates, and—”

She shoves the paper back at him, pulse beginning to roar in her ears. “You think this is a joke?” she demands. “Where did you get this? How did you know I would be here?”

His eyes dart around nervously. “We. . . didn’t?” he tries. “Honestly, we thought we’d be the only ones here, that’s why we’re here so late.”

She laughs near-hysterically and pushes her hair up back from her forehead. She finally finds the weird fucks sending her fucked-up DMs and envelopes and they end up being absolute dipshits that can’t even sell her a decent lie.

“Are you kidding me?” She scans the light around, flashing it at each of them in order. One of them can’t stop eyeing her hatchet. She hopes it’s her hatchet he’s looking at. Either way, unsettling and fucking _weird_. “You harass me for months and then you can’t even lie convincingly about it?”

The first one, lanky like he’s just finished a growth spurt, steps forward and she spins on him. He puts his hands up again, but she notices he still takes care to fix the camera on her. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” he says slowly. “We’ve honestly never seen you before in our life.”

“Then why are you here?” she challenges. “For real.”

One of them, the short one, rolls his eyes and looks at the others. “Let’s just go, man,” he says. “This isn’t important, we have other things to do here—”

“Like what.” Her patience is starting to run out, as is her nerve. It’s _dark_ by now, with the trees blocking out the last of the meagre sunlight, and she needs to catch the last bus out.

“Like find what’s at those coordinates,” the tall one says calmly. “Look, you go your way and we’ll go ours. We legitimately don’t want any trouble.”

“Why are you so pressed?” the short one demands. “We were just walking the trail then you decided to get up in our business—this is on you!”

“I got one of those envelopes too!” The confession bursts out of her, unintended, and she grimaces.

The one with the beard furrows his brow. “You got an envelope too? With the same coordinates?”

She nods. Might as well at this point. “You mean you genuinely aren’t the ones that have been fucking with me then?”

“Honestly,” says the tall guy. “We legit just got here. We don’t know shit.”

“Do you have a picture of your clue?” asks the beard guy.

Her gut tells her she can trust them. Her brain tells her she’s an absolute idiot if she gives them any more information.

Her gut wins out. “Yeah,” she says, swiping through her phone and starting to scroll through her camera roll. “Yeah, I got a picture of it, hang on—”

A drop of blood spatters on her hand as she holds her phone.

She stares at it, uncomprehending, for a moment that stretches elastic through time.

It’s been so long. It’s been nearly two whole years.

A pounding, pushing headache begins behind her eyes and she looks up, distantly feeling blood dripping down her lip.

The guys freeze as she looks up. “Whoa,” says one, she doesn’t look to see who it is—she can’t, she’s freezing up again, _is that all she can do_ —

“Hey, uh, you don’t look that g—”

“ _Look_.”

She doesn’t need to. She can feel it. The pressure, the blood, the unyielding fog clouding her mind. She knows when she looks up, she will see a white, empty face. Long limbs stretched out of proportion. A hand, waiting for her to take it.

“Fuck!” someone curses and the spell is broken.

She switches off her flashlight and _runs_.

It’s only when she is on the bus, phone somehow safely in her pocket and hand automatically applying pressure on the burst vessel in her nose, that she begins to shake. She thanks whatever instinct guided her to sit in the back of the bus where she won’t disturb anyone and puts her head between her knees, dragging in deep breaths through her mouth.

She just _ran_. That’s all she does. Every single time. She ran from her past to college, she ran from strangers on the Internet asking for her help, and she ran from three people dealing with the same thing she is, leaving them behind to the Man’s tender mercy.

It’s not like she could do much. Right? She’s just one person. All she has is a hatchet, if that even does anything against him, but…

She could have at least bore witness.

She barely recognizes when it’s her stop—it’s only the familiar sway of the bus as it pulls into her cul-de-sac that alerts her. She gets up, trying to ignore how the other passengers pull back and avoid making eye contact with her, the blood-covered shaking girl with smeared mascara running down her cheeks. It takes her two tries to fumble her key into the lock.

If that dog-thing even _tries_ fucking with her tonight she might as well just let it eat her.

She leaves the clothes to be thrown out (she’s had enough of scrubbing blood out of cloth for now to make it worth it) and goes to take a long, hot shower. By the time she feels at least somewhat clean, the water has long since run cold.

Steph sits down on her bed, hair dripping wet down her back, and buries her face in her hands.

She’s had the worst fucking revelation in the world.

Hating herself, hating the hands that pick up her phone and unlock it, she texts Jessa.

_What was ur boyfriend’s youtube channel again?_ she asks.

The response comes quickly. _EverymanHYBRID_ , Jessa texts back. _Jeff was adamant abt the caps don’t ask me why_

She hunts down their YouTube channel, already knowing what she’ll see.

Her suspicions were right. Same four-arrowed logo. Weird stuff happening to them about the same time it started happening to her. And the same three men on the channel that she met in the woods.

Steph throws her phone across the room, shoves a pillow over her head, andscreams.

She has just left her best friend’s boyfriend in the woods to die.

* * *

Ordinarily she would pull the same shit she usually does when something like this happens and miss class for the next few days, but frankly she doesn’t feel safe enough in her own apartment to risk it.

She wakes up on Monday (Sunday is a blur) and drags herself to evening classes. She doesn’t even want to meet Jessa’s eyes but she forces herself to ask. “How’s Jeff?” She stares at her sketchbook, fidgets with her pencil.

She can hear rather than see Jessa’s confusion. “Fine,” she says, and Steph can finally exhale. “Why?”

She starts doodling on the blank page, not really thinking about what she lets come out on paper. “Ran into them in the woods over the weekend.”

“ _What?_ ”

“What?” Steph says, shocked a bit into defensiveness. “The note I got turned out to be coordinates, so I went to check it out.”

_“Alone?_ ”

“It ended up fine!” Been a fair bit since someone had been worried enough over her to be worried. “I guess I wasn’t alone after all—the three of them gave me a fucking heart attack out in the middle of the night.”

“Ugh, this is a mess,” Jessa moans. “I was going to introduce the four of you in a controlled environment, but all of you are just _insane_.”

“’Controlled environment?’” Steph cracks a smile as she flips to a new page. “What are we, feral cats?”

“Yes,” says Jessa. “Feral fucking cats.”

She comes home that evening and keeps watch while editing the livestream footage down into a video. She films a quick, terribly-lit outro summarizing what happened after she cut her camera and, after a brief debate over whether or not she should link the EverymanHYBRID channel, she decides to forgo it and just posts the video. There’s nothing to gain in letting them know her online presence right now.

She ends up watching a few of their videos before she catches her few hours of sleep for the night. They’re funny, once she gets past the terrible clickbait-y titles. They seem like decent guys. She picks up their names—Jeff, of course, and Evan, and Vinnie. Every now and then it seems another guy—Jeff’s brother, maybe, judging by how similar they look—dips in to hang out. Or another girl, a friend of theirs.

They seem like nice people. If they truly are in the same situation she is, she feels bad for them.

They seem so full of _life_. They seem so bright, even bickering with each other over camera glitches and weird footage in videos. It makes her feel—empty, in a way she hasn’t felt in a while. Like she should be there. Like she’s missing something crucial, something she can almost put her finger on but can’t quite find.

The thing in her closet has been silent since that night she called Jessa in a panic. She hopes it hasn’t found a new target.

The next day, a new video on the EverymanHYBRID channel is posted. Idly, she puts it on while she gets ready for the day.

Halfway through shrugging on her flannel, she stops dead in her tracks when she hears her own voice through the phone speakers.

“—don’t fucking test me,” she hears as if from a distance, the ambient sounds of a forest at night nearly drowning her out.

She wrestles her arms through the flannel and stares at the screen. She looks _wild_. Clutching her hatchet like she’s the final girl of a horror movie, glaring around at every twig that snaps. It’s kind of a great look, she has to be honest, but also she looks _terrifying_. She doesn’t really blame Jeff for approaching her so cautiously.

They edit out most of the encounter, keeping only the last bit where her nose starts bleeding and they see the Man. She watches it, partly out of the need to know how they got out of that situation and partly out of morbid curiosity. For some reason, she’s never tried to capture the Man on camera and she watches what happens as Jeff turns the camera on him. He glitches out the camera something awful, all terrible staticky sirens and image stutters.

To her surprise, the Man doesn’t really…do anything. None of the boys get the nosebleed she does, or the pounding headache. He just looks at them, with that face that isn’t a face. She gasps aloud in the empty apartment as Evan _charges_ him. Jesus.

Even so, even after a blatant attempt at an attack, he doesn’t really hurt them. The camera glitches and Evan is left swinging at thin air, cutting a pale gash in the bark of a tree. He curses, then looks closer. “Guys,” he says slowly. “Look at this.”

When Jeff moves the camera closer, focuses on the tree, she sees an eye carved into the bark. It looks old, and the bark had scarred over until it nearly blended into the untouched part of the bark.

The rest of the video is mostly them hunting around, digging up the dirt underneath that marked tree, and finding a locked wooden box. There’s scratches and marks all over it, but she can’t tell from the video if they mean anything or if it’s random. They promise an unboxing later, livestreamed on their Twitch. Steph turns off her phone and shoves it into her pocket.

She almost feels annoyed that they found _her_ loot, but she knew if she stayed a second longer the Man would not be pleased.

Looks like she has to make a Twitch account.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You have literally NO IDEA how long I have been waiting to throw the boys into the mix I have missed them so MUCH!!! They are here now and I'm delighted!!! Also side note I truly deeply appreciate every single comment I get about this fic...if I missed replying to your comment I'm deeply sorry but you really need to know that I truly appreciate each bit of feedback and comments I get <333 it makes me beyond happy!!! Thank you <3


	11. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Pooling resources never hurt anyone.

It’s a letter. Some kind of letter, or journal entry, or some document. It’s a scan of a document that looks old, written on a typewriter. Along with a plastic grabby hand, inexplicably, and a stuffed toy rabbit, its neck strangled with a length of purple duct tape.

General weird shit. She watches as Vinnie scans through the document and his face drops. “This—this is some weird shit,” he says. “Guys, look at this.”

Evan grabs the paper from him and looks it over. His face contorts in disgust and he shoves it at Jeff. “If this is a joke,” he says to the camera, “it’s not fucking funny. This shit—this isn’t something you joke about.”

Jeff, voice carefully controlled, reads it aloud to stream.

The date on it reads February 27th, 1975. By the sound of it, it’s written by a father, although the clinical tone of the words sometimes makes it hard to detect the affection clear by the actions described. It describes emotional struggles a group of four children faced, in particular detailing an occurrence where, with no prior warning, the four of them were teleported more than three hundred miles away .

Of note is that someone—an unidentified ‘he’—teleported them there, and that all four of the children knew him.

Of further, more unsettling note, is that the children’s names were Evan, Jeffrey, Vinnie, and Stephanie.

Steph doesn’t realize she’s gnawing her lip until she stops. She has a bad feeling about this, and it’s not just a sick sense of déjà vu. She grabs her phone, keeping one eye on the stream. The guys look just as unnerved as she is, no matter how much they try to play it off by bad jokes. She texts Jessa.

_tell jeff to message me,_ she texts. _can you give him my contact info?_

She has to wait a bit for the reply—she forgot Jessa has afternoon classes.

_Sure,_ she responds. _Texting him ur info now. What’s up?_

_I was watching their stream and ur right, it has to be the same person fucking w us. I think we need to pool resources asap._

_Gotcha,_ Jessa responds. _I gtg but i just sent him ur stuff, gl ily!!_

 _Ilyt,_ Steph texts back, then turns her full attention back to the stream.

She watches as Jeff frowns and pulls up his phone. Evan rags on him for getting a text from his girlfriend, but he shuts up when Jeff puts the phone to his ear.

She gets that feeling again, that dizzy feeling like she is shifting and aligning some cosmic thread.

Her phone rings.

She picks it up.

“Who _are_ you?” says Jeff through her phone speaker. “Jessa just texted me your number and said you were the girl in the video. How the _fuck_ —you better not be fucking with us _or_ Jessa, or—”

She watches Jeff’s lips move in the livestream’s delay, seven seconds too late.

“Hello?” he says. “Are you there?”

“I’m here,” she says. “I’ve been watching a few of your videos since we met in the woods. They’re pretty funny.”

“I—wh—” Listening to him stutter is pretty fucking funny too. “Who _are_ you? What do you know?”

“Cut the stream,” she says. “I don’t want too many people hearing this.”

“What?”

“Cut the stream.”

“I—okay, fuck—” He covers the phone with his hand and she can still hear, muffled, his aside to Evan. “Dude, cut the stream.”

“What? We said we’d go till like five at least!”

“She won’t talk with the camera on.”

Evan narrows his eyes at him, but Jeff sticks his jaw out and glares at him meaningfully until he concedes. Evan rolls his eyes and goes to shut the camera off. Twitch chat is disappointed, but as the internet goes, fairly respectful.

“The camera’s off,” Jeff tells her, and sure enough the livestream goes dark. “Who are you? What do you know that’s so important you can’t say it on air?”

Steph sighs. It’s hard to break the habit of keeping certain pieces of information close to her heart. “I know enough to not want to bring unnecessary people into it,” she tells them. “That’s not much of an answer, I know, but I’ve been dealing with this shit my whole life. This isn’t something you want to take lightly.”

“What do you mean?” She can hear rustling in the background, as if he’s fumbling for pen and paper to take notes.

“I mean the more you talk about this monster, the worse it gets,” Steph says. “You’ve been seeing the Man, right?” It’s an empty question. She knows the answer to that—if the way Evan ran at the thing unprovoked is any indication, they’ve seen him before.

“Yeah,” says Jeff. “Tall, faceless—”

“Stuffed into a shitty fucking suit,” Evan puts in. She assumes she’s on speaker phone at this point.

“Yep.” Steph starts doodling restlessly on a scrap of paper, giving her eyes something to look at while she talks. She realizes half a beat too late that it’s the torn piece of paper she was given as a clue. She scribbles over the EverymanHYBRID logo in a small act of pettiness. “He’s been messing with me since I was born. Used to fucking. Give him drawings when I was little. Shit like that.”

“What did he do?” Jeff asks.

“He started fucking with the people around me.” Steph runs an emotional scan of herself. Is she okay to talk about this without shutting down and withdrawing from the conversation?

Yeah, she decides. What the fuck.

“The first really bad time was when he burned down my middle school.” She hears a startled intake of air on the other end. “No one was killed, thankfully, but it was a warning. I knew it was because he was following me. Then I lost my family, four years later. Now he’s been silent, but something else has been on my trail.”

“Something else?” That must be Vinnie.

“Mmm,” she hums. Her hand drew out an eye from the paper without her knowing. She crosses it out. “Weird bald dog-thing, for one. Cut up my arms real bad. And someone’s been sending me weird creeper shots on Instagram, covered with ciphers. Not really the Man’s mode of operation.”

“We’ve been getting the weird pictures too,” says Jeff. “Stills from videos of us we don’t remember, unfamiliar tweets coming out of our account we never wrote. You say the Tall Man’s not really a tech guy?”

“You saw the videos you took—he glitched out the camera the moment he was in frame. Whoever’s online sending us physical stuff—my guess is that it’s someone else.”

“Or some _thing_ ,” mutters Evan. “The online creep stuff is familiar, but not the bald dog monster…”

“How did you get the Man to stop following you?” asks Vinnie. “If you haven’t seen him since last weekend.”

She laughs, and it sounds harsh even to her own ears. “I didn’t stop him,” she says. “I ignored him.”

“What?”

“After the burned school,” she says, “I did some digging. Turns out some people—not many, but some—people just ignored him. Turned the cameras off, quit their blogs—just stopped thinking about him. Some got on Vivirten, but that’s not considered a life-saving prescription and costs an arm and a leg. For a few of them, just ignoring him was enough, and he stopped following them. Not for me though.

“From what I gathered,” Steph says, “the Man works like a virus. He’s not really alive, but he’s not inanimate either. He wants to spread his influence, and the more people know about him, the more powerful he becomes.”

“The Tulpa effect,” Jeff says.

“Exactly.” She twirls the pencil between her fingers. “If you ignore him, you’re not a disease vector for him anymore. He stops paying attention to you, however his attention might manifest.”

“But you’re talking to us,” interrupts Evan. “What’s up with that?”

She hears a muffled scuffle and cursing and she smiles a little. “You’re not going to like this answer,” she says.

Jeff huffs. It comes down the line as a short burst of static. “Try us,” he says drily.

She puts the pencil down. “I think for the four of us, it’s too late,” she says honestly. “I’ve seen a few of your videos. You garner tons of views. You’re too good for him to want to let go. I don’t think any of us are going to get out of whatever this is unscathed.”

She can hear the click of his throat as he swallows. “And you?” he asks. “Why’s it too late for you?”

She smiles thinly. “I think he just likes me,” she says bitterly.

“Shit,” says Jeff, emphatically.

“Yeah,” agrees Steph.

“Listen,” Jeff says, and he puts his phone down with a _clunk_. “Can we talk face to face at some point? Something clearly wants us together, and while I’d normally be leery of doing whatever some random fuck with a taste for puzzles wants us to do, I feel like it’d be easier puzzling over whatever the _fuck_ is going on here together.”

Steph doesn’t consider herself easily fazed by anything normal people do, but this takes her aback. “That’s a big offer,” she says. “You sure you’d feel safe with that? The last time I saw you I was about to take your hand off with a hatchet.”

She can hear a smile in his voice. “Jessa seems to like you,” he says. “That’s good enough for me.”

* * *

They meet in person on neutral territory. Jessa’s apartment.

When she raps on the door, she’s greeted with a muffled “Coming!” and the sound of feet. Jessa opens the door, hair ruffled, and Steph raises an eyebrow.

“Should I give you a few minutes?” she asks, only half-joking.

Jessa huffs at her and finger-combs her hair into a semblance of order before letting her in. “Shut up,” she says fondly.

“I take it Jeff’s here already?” Steph says. As she walks through the small kitchen area to the living room, her question is answered. The man himself is sitting on the couch, perfectly composed except for the circles of red that burn high in his cheeks.

Steph decides to show him some mercy and not bring it up. She takes the chair across from the couch. “How, uh.” She is bad at this. “How’ve you been.”

“Uh,” says Jeff, and she begins to wonder if she is not the only one bad at this. “Been pretty quiet on our front. We’re currently trying to just like, work through the information we have now and try to make sense of it.”

“Yeah, so about that—”

The two of them are hip-deep in a tangent about potential patterns in the ciphers they’ve been getting when Jessa has to get up to buzz in Evan and Vinnie. They clatter into the living room, bickering good-naturedly about the nature of folk demons, and take up the rest of the couch.

Steph shifts nervously on the chair. It’s not even like there’s a lot of them (literally only _three_ of them), and Jessa is here too, but they’re _loud_ and they fill up the small room and _hoooo boy this is a lot right now_.

Jessa, ever-perceptive, comes over to perch on the arm of the chair as the boys start laying out the information they’ve found. “You doing okay?” she asks in an undertone. “They’re a lot, I know.”

Steph manages a smile for her. “I’m okay,” she says. “It’s all good.”

She pats her shoulder. “Okay,” she says. “I’m going to make tea.”

Steph looks up at her. “Thank you,” she says, and she looks over to see what the EverymanHYBRID crew is bringing to the table.

They start off scanning through every single recorded run-in either of them have had with the Man. There are no videos for her, but she’s able to give them a close-enough rundown of the events that it’s good enough. They’ve had a substantial amount of run-ins on their end—the Man appearing in their windows, places they film outside, even one of their houses. All of their encounters as of yet were more scare tactics than actual bodily harm, she notes—sure, the Man banged a few doors and teleported them around, but none of them got the nosebleeds or pounding headaches she’s gotten before. And none of them, she notices with a bit of bitterness, have lost any of the people around them.

Next, they go to pooling their information on the ciphers. So far, none of them have been more difficult than just cross-posting the text to a base64 or binary or alphanumeric decoder, but she personally doesn’t put it past whoever this is to bump it up a notch and start throwing in Vigenere or something like that.

Here, though, is where it begins to differ: all of her ciphers, as far as she could tell, were just meant to freak her out. Obscure, weird stuff—“soon” and “safe for now” and “creatures of”. Things that were meant to unnerve her, feed her paranoia.

The other three got similar ciphers, either embedded in their videos or through hijacking their channel Twitter account. However, all of their ciphers had real-life connections—they were coordinates to random places, or peoples’ names. There’s one line, repeated over and over again, that none of them can puzzle out.

Rabbit or Habit?

It’s an Animal Collective line, sure, but the amount of times that single line gets repeated throughout their ciphers? It’s unorthodox.

After a solid few hours of just combing through their collective knowledge, Steph sighs and sits back, rubbing her eyes. “Okay,” she says, and takes a sip of tea long since gone cold. “The way I see this, there are three different groups here.” She begins ticking them off on her fingers. “There’s us, there’s the man in the suit, and there’s whatever’s fucking with us through tech. Some of them may be working together, but we’re not there yet.” She looks at the other three. “Did I miss anything?”

“What about the thing in your closet?” Jeff asks. “Where does that play into things?”

She looks back down at her arms. The lacerations the Rake gave her have scabbed over and Jessa had given her the go-ahead to leave off the bandages, but they don’t look pretty. “It’s been quiet for the last week or so,” she says. “Its MO is more…up-front than the other two. Do you think it counts as another group? Or just cryptid bad luck?”

Vinnie frowns and looks at his notes. “You said it…spoke to you?”

She can feel her upper lip curl in disgust. “Yeah,” she says. “Weird shit, like people’s names, or weird prophecy-stuff.”

“So it’s not like, some dumb animal or anything,” he says. “It’s intelligent enough to hold a motive?”

She shrugs. “I guess,” she says. “I mean, we still don’t know if those parties are individual or if they’re working together—it’s been pretty well-documented that the Man can influence people to do what he wants. We could easily just simplify this down to us versus them.”

“Okay,” Evan says, and he leans forward. “We can go with five parties then, and let’s just fuck it, assume the worst, and say they’re all collectively working together to just fuck us up. What can we _do?_ ”

“Steph,” says Jeff. “Honestly. How did you make it this long? You’ve been just—absolutely alone this whole time, right?”

She exhales. “Yeah,” she says. “I mean, I don’t know.” She looks at them head-on. “I really don’t know. He’s had every opportunity to hurt me—I could’ve been burned, I could’ve gotten sick, coughed up tar like my brother, been just straight-up killed by him, however he does it. The only reason I’m still alive is because he’s letting me.”

Jeff furrows his brow. She can tell she hasn’t entirely convinced him, but frankly it’s not her problem. It’s the truth. That’s all she can give right now.

“So…what?” Evan sits back, looks at Jeff and Vinnie. “We just—keep going? Try to figure out more about whoever those people are? Try to stay alive?”

Vinnie shrugs. “Well, I’m not about to just give up,” he says. “At least we know we’re not alone.”

“I’ll keep you updated on any new info I get,” Steph offers. “I have your numbers now, so if I get another picture or coordinates I can give you a heads-up.”

“Or if you get attacked again,” Jessa says sternly. “Don’t fucking bleed out in your one-room apartment because your stubborn ass won’t get to the ER.”

Steph concedes that point, but she says, “That goes for you guys too, okay? Let me know if things get physical, because I have no idea what he could possibly be planning.”

Vinnie nods. “We’ll let you know if we get any clues too,” he says. “If it’s anything like last time, we might end up looking for the same thing again.”

She nods and stands to take her leave. “Thanks for your info,” she says, and hesitates. “Thank you for…I’m glad I’m not alone.” That’s more honesty than perhaps she’s ready for, but today she has pushed so many of her own boundaries she might as well push one more. “Even though it means you’re in this hell too, I’m glad I’m not the only one.”

Vinnie gives her a wry smile. “Us too,” he says. “Even if it means piecing together shit like this.”

It’s quiet for the next few days. She didn’t seem to push any buttons meeting with them, and if not friends, then they are at the very least tentative allies, and that is more than enough for her. Communication between them goes quiet too, but even so she keeps up with whatever videos they put out on their YouTube channel, as well as their Twitter feed. She has no doubt they’re doing the same for her own TikTok and YouTube account—scanning through her videos, keeping an eye out for anything odd she might not have put in there herself.

It’s nice knowing she’s not going this alone, that there’s someone ready to catch her if something slips through the cracks, but even so it’s not quite a hold she’s ready to put her entire weight on. These guys—they’re smart. She has no doubt that if things start truly going south, they will be as scrupulous at hammering down or cutting off loose ends as she would be.

She doesn’t blame them. Truly. She doesn’t. She would do the same.

If it weren’t for Jessa vouching for them—someone she trusts implicitly, somehow, through some twist of fate—she wouldn’t give them a scrap of her information. She’s seen the reach they have through their channel and other social media. If they are genuinely just trying to figure out what’s going on, she ordinarily wouldn’t risk them bringing her into their picture and inadvertently making her a larger target. If they’re not, if they’re proxies influenced by the Man to draw in more and more people to feed him, she would have ran long ago.

She genuinely can’t quite make them out. Her gut feeling is that she can trust them, but she’s also not an idiot.

She makes the alliance cautiously, and they reciprocate that ginger trust.

The thing in her closet keeps its distance. It seems to know that it crossed a line with her last time, and she hasn’t heard even a nail-scratch since that night. She cleans up the spilled books and supplies that came toppling down when it broke through her makeshift barricade, and spends an afternoon trying to figure out how to repair the splintered, cracked shelves.

She still tries to spend as little time as possible in the apartment, but as one week, then another, pass with no incident, she begins testing the waters. She gets a full night’s sleep for the first time in months.

Classes go about the same as they always do. She and Jessa study together in name only, and when finals are over they finally have that double feature of shitty terrible animated movies. Steph laughs till she cries and threatens to draw Jessa as a terrible abomination to the name of cat.

End of May, she rents a car and drives back down to Alabama because she’s too broke to reasonably buy an airline ticket. She stays at a Holiday Inn for a day and visits her old synagogue. She sits with the graves of her mother and brother and leaves rocks on their gravestone, carefully nestled into the natural divots and impressions in the stone. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t need to. She is able to carry their deaths by herself.

Early June, she receives a DM from an account that had been silent for three months. Just like before: a single warped picture, and nothing else.

For once, it is not a picture of either her or a place she frequents. She frowns, peering closer at the image. It looks like the two figures in the middle of the photo have had their heads scribbled out by pencil. The text on the bottom doesn’t look like a Caesar shift, or at least not one that she can visually look at and mentally puzzle out.

Steph sighs and goes back to the drawing board. Rot13 is a no-go, as is Caesar, like she suspected. She has a sneaky suspicion it’s a Vigenere, where a keyword or short phrase is stripped of repeated letters and the last letter of the key begins the transposed alphabet—but she has no clue what the keyword could be.

She sits down one night after a shift at her part-time job and makes a list of words that have popped up in previous pictures.

_-safe for now_

_-it seems you’re a creature of_

_-soon_

None of them have any particular rhyme or reason—just unsettling. 

She tries ‘SAFE’, ‘CREATURE’, and ‘SOON’. Nothing.

She runs through every single word, even the fillers and articles, and gets nothing but a pile of wasted paper.

She decides to go to bed.

The next day she wakes up with a song in her head.

_Hungry bread and butter hustle_ , croons a voice amidst frantic guitar. _You’ve been doing it a while, it is only fair…_

Rabbit or Habit?

She doesn’t bother getting dressed, just fumbling for a pen and paper and running through the shifted alphabet key. She pulls up the second image—“it seems you’re a creature of.”

Habit?

So says the common proverb.

She tries ‘HABIT’ as the keyword. Still garbled but better.‘RABBIT’—take out the repeated B and it becomes ‘RABIT’, which means A is R—she’s looked at the original string of eleven letters so often now that she doesn’t need to look at the picture—

OUTSIDE HELP?

A weight settles in the pit of her stomach. She sits, still and quiet, in the midst of her sleep-messed sheets.

Whoever it is, they know that she’s not alone.

She slits her eyes against the weak morning light and weighs her options. Whoever’s fucking with them now without a doubt knows that the four of them are working together. Either this means they are on the right path—which no doubt the forthcoming images, clues, and hacked socials will confirm—or they are playing right into this mysterious entity’s hands, giving them a weapon through their predictability.

She grabs her phone and texts the first EverymanHYBRID name that pops up in her contacts. It’s Evan. _gotten any new messages lately?_ she asks.

_jesus shitfuck its like 8am on a saturday_ , he texts back. _lemme check_.

She’s up and out of bed, brushing her teeth, when her phone pings again.

_sure fuckin did,_ he texts. _some field with text in the background, all random letters._

 _try a vigenere w rabit as keyword_ , she sends him.

 _lmao u spelled rabbet wrong._ And then two seconds later-- _whats vigenere_

She stares at her phone. She can feel a laugh bubbling up from her belly, and so she lets it out, mint toothpaste still frothy and cool on her tongue. It’s a good thing at least she out of the four has developed an interest in cipher-solving.

_ask jeff abt it, he seems like a puzzles guy_ , she says. _lmk if you get anything interesting._

He sends her back an absolutely cryptic deepfried meme, which she decides to take as an affirmative.

Towards the latter half of the day, Jeff texts her. She’s putting broad washes of color over the background of the painting _,_ putting in the big colors before she draws out the details. She shakes excess watercolor off of her brush and puts it aside before picking up her phone.

_Thanks for the key,_ he texts. _It was a little off but similar enough that I was able to brute-force it anyways_.

_what did it say?_

The typing bubble pops up, then dies back down. She can imagine the conversation taking place across the line.

Either way, he must have been convinced to tell her the truth because when he texts her back, he says, _OUTSIDE HELP? Question mark and all. It seems someone’s caught on to our collaboration._

She starts gnawing on her lip. _mine said the exact same thing,_ she tells him. _picture of an empty field with two people’s faces scribbled out. i’ll send you a picture._

His was of what she could only assume was the same place, just from a different angle. The pathway surrounded by trees looked the same, although there was only so much she could glean from a distorted picture of an ambiguous field in the woods. There were no people in it, but if she squinted, she could just barely make out a tall, thin figure, standing in the woods. That was all she really needed to see.

_just out of curiosity,_ she says, _what was ur key?_

_HABIT_ , he says. _So it wasn’t too terrible with the key you gave us to muscle out the words_.

Rabbit or Habit again.

_you aren’t missing the pattern, are you_

_Not in the slightest. Can’t tell if this is just a tongue-in-cheek reference or some bigger meaning. I’ll do some digging later._

_sounds good. stay safe._

Steph decides to do some digging of her own.

She takes a trip to the library and stakes out a public computer—she doesn’t want to risk infecting her own PC with anything. On a more paranoid note, she would also rather not look up more sensitive information on a device she uses often—given that this person is clearly keeping tabs on their movements, it can’t hurt to throw off the pattern every now and then.

She logs on and searches “Rabbit or Habit”.

She combs through what feels like a hundred lyrics websites before landing on anything substantial. Vicious flashbacks to middle school forums flashing through her head, she whittles down the search to posts before 2020, and then further to include waybackmachine feedback.

By the time her free internet hour is nearly up, she’s found a few interesting-looking links—mostly what looks like blog posts referencing the song, with a few album reviews thrown in for good measure. Most of it will probably be dead ends, just by the looks of it, but she’s learned that it’s not worth it to assume. She’ll throw in the towel once she’s scrubbed through every single blog’s HTML code and tried her best to check every single dead link.

She sends the links to herself and wipes her history. She’ll check it later. She texts Jeff again as she heads out.

_dug up a few internet leads,_ she tells him. _i’ll let u know if anything interesting comes up_

Half an hour later, she gets a response. G _oing to check out a few leads of my own. Likewise._

Hmph. She hopes she can trust Jessa’s taste anyways.

* * *

_Interlude_.

_The camera blurs, then focuses in on Jeff. The angle is slanted, as the camera is set unevenly on the table._

JEFF

(controlled, as if he knows he’s in the wrong here but doesn’t want to start a fight)

Look, I know you don’t want to hear this, but how can we know she’s trustworthy? She comes out of nowhere—Evan, she tried to take your fucking _hand_ off—and all of a sudden this mysterious guy that’s been messing with us knows our every move? For all we know she’s the one planting clues! Fucked-up, weird documents with our names on it from 50 years ago—come on! Sketchy!

_Evan runs his hands through his hair, clearly frustrated, as they’ve had this conversation what feels like twenty times over._

EVAN

(frustrated)

Even _if_ we can’t trust her, she’s obviously survived this long! Why not just work with her for now, and the moment she does something _actually_ shifty we just dip, instead of just poring like a fucking _vulture_ over every single action everyone takes? Just calm down!

JEFF

(finally aggravated, his control fraying)

Don’t tell _me_ to calm down, you were the one who tried to hit Slenderman with a fucking _bat_ —

VINNIE

Okay, okay, can we all just take a deep breath and—

JEFF

And? And? We’ve been filming this shit for almost half a year now and we still have no idea if this is just a bad joke or someone who’s actually stalking us. We can’t afford to be _calm_ , we need to fucking _prioritize_ and eliminate the variables we can’t trust!

_Jeff is pacing now, shoulders hunched and tight. Evan is watching him, a mix of frustration and concern on his face._

VINNIE

(softly—he knows he is about to touch on a sore subject)

Jeff. You know you can’t—

EVAN

Vin, don’t—

VINNIE

You know you can’t hold onto this forever.

_Jeff freezes in his pacing. Slowly, he straightens up._

VINNIE

I’m sorry, but you know you aren’t being reasonable about this. We have no reason not to trust Steph, and she’s helped us already. You can’t—the tighter you hold onto everyone the easier things are to slip through the cracks. You know?

_Jeff glares at him. Vinnie sets his jaw and looks back at him evenly._

VINNIE

You know I’m right.

_Jeff breathes out slowly and looks away._

JEFF

Fine. But when this blows up in our face I’m gonna fucking drag you guys through the mud.

_Break._

After a week of intermittent digging in between shifts at the library, Steph thinks she might have come up with something. She texts the groupchat.

_the doctor in that document you found on the hiking trail_ , she says. _the doctor’s name was corenthal, right?_

He takes his time responding, but Jeff texts back by evening. She catches up as she eats dinner. _Sorry, long shift at the hospital. Yeah, it was. James, I think._

 _cool._ She crunches a piece of lettuce and stabs at her salad again. _when i googled the name his wife came up, apparently she died a while ago and left a message she requested to be published in her obituary_

_What was it_

_it was kind of sweet, actually._ She gets salad dressing on her phone and she smudges it away with her thumb. “ _i want my children to remember that they still have a family, whoever they are._ _(40.392330, -74.758900).401.’_

 _That’s highkey coordinates,_ Vinnie says.

_yep. a storage facility. and if that’s not the storage pod’s number i’ll eat my jorts._

 _Evocative_ , says Jeff.

_anyone down to give me a ride?_ she asks. _sounds like this is another scavenger hunt situation_

Within seconds, her phone pings again. Evan. _YES BUT ONLY IF U LEMME SEE THAT HATCHET_

She stares at her screen, bewildered. _what??? If this is a bad pickup line you will See The Hatchet_

 _No he’s just like that,_ Vinnie tells her. _Got a hardon for knives ever since his dad took him camping and he got to pick out a little baby switchblade_

_i still have it its in my room im gonna give it to alex just u wait_

_No one is giving my little brother a knife._ _Steph where is the location? We can give you a lift if you want, I don’t think it’s smart to split up rn_

She sends them a screenshot of the Google map. _it’s rented out in the same name as that doctor in the document you found. did u figure out anything abt him btw?_

_We can tell you when we pick you up,_ says Vinnie. _Easier than texting it_.

Neatly done.

_sounds good,_ she texts anyways. If she came away from the Rake all right, she can handle a few teenage guys. _what abt tomorrow? i’m free anytime after like 3_

 _I can come by around 4:30-ish,_ Jeff offers.

_sounds good_

The day of the storage facility raid dawns cool and cloudy. She texts Jessa before she heads out, just as a precaution. As a further precaution, she packs a drawstring bag with an extra charger, a portable battery pack, and, of course, the hatchet—head down, with the sheath on. Just in case.

Jeff pulls up outside her apartment just as she’s leaving the door. Vinnie rolls down the shotgun window and waves at her. “Steph!” he yells. “Sorry, you’re stuck in the back with Evan!”

She waves back and swings her bag over her shoulder. “Guess he’ll get to meet the hatchet after all,” she yells back. As Vinnie rolls the window back up she can hear a burst of laughter, raucous against the still summer air.

They remind her of her brother. Just a bit.

It’s the stupid boy energy, she decides, and wrestles open the sticky car door. Absolutely inimitable by any other stupid energy you could find.

Evan scooches over to let her have the seat on that side. “Hey,” he says. “Sorry if that was like—” he gestures wordlessly for a second, then—“weird. The hatchet thing. I didn’t think.”

“You don’t think,” says Jeff, squinting for half a second at his phone’s GPS before Vinnie hisses at him to keep his eyes on the road.

She smiles despite herself. Stupid boy energy. “Don’t worry about it,” she says. “I have it with me either way.”

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Swap?” he asks. “I get to look at your hatchet— _not a pickup line—_ and you can look at my beautiful hunting knife.”

“Beautiful hunting knife?” She’s already opening her bag. “How beautiful can a hunting knife get?”

He looks at her like she’s from outer space but simultaneously the only person he can talk to. “How beautiful can—okay, _look_ at her and you’ll get it, how beautiful can a hunting knife get, my—.” She lets him take her bag in exchange for the handle being pressed into her hands, a grin spreading across her face as he grumbles about steel grades and hardness tests. Weird hobby, but she’s the one who spends her free time melting down prosthetic-grade gelatin to slather all over her face like her skin is melting, so frankly it’s not like she has much room to talk.

It _is_ a pretty knife, and she _oohs_ and _aahs_ over it dutifully as Jeff meets her eyes in the rearview mirror, commiserating. “There’s _two_ of them now,” he says dolefully to Vinnie, and Evan pretends to ignore him.

They pull into the storage facility parking lot and he gives her her hatchet back, careful to grasp the sheathed head and offer her the handle. She wraps her fingers around the handle and offers him his knife back. He tucks it into the waist of his jeans and asks, “You ever have to use it?”

“Yeah.” She opens the car door and slips out, feeling the weight of the hatchet thump against her back. “Once.”

“Almost twice,” he says, stumbling a little as he catches up with her. “Not about to sneak up on you anytime soon.”

They make their way through the rows and rows of storage capsules—she notices Jeff with his handheld camera and makes a mental note to ask him for a bit of the footage that she can splice into her channel. “Number 401,” she reminds Vinnie, and he nods and moves ahead of them, scanning the numbers on the sides of the pods.

“What happened?” Evan asks her. It doesn’t seem he does well with silence, with Vinnie up ahead of them and Jeff behind them filming.

She decides to indulge him. “You remember the monster in my closet?” She’s tried to sketch it a few times by now—there’s something about the anatomy that’s off every time, even though she nails the cruel jagged nails every single time.

“Oh, _shit_ ,” Evan says. “Yeah, I’ve seen the sketches you’ve been posting to Instagram. That’s a _nasty_ looking motherfucker.”

“I’ve gotten into the habit of sleeping with the hatchet in reach,” she says. They pass pod 221. “I woke up one night with it like…crouched. On my chest.” Evan pulls a grimace and she quirks her lips at him. “Smelled like wet dog, but _worse_. It knew I was awake so I had to move as slow as possible trying to grab the hatchet before it woke up.”

“Is that how—” He gestures wordlessly to the scars that drag down her arms.

“Yeah.” Her hands begin getting weird and sweaty as she remembers that night. “I got a good hit on it, right in the side. Fucked me up good, though. I had to call Jessa, I literally couldn’t think straight. If it weren’t for her—Jesus, I don’t know. Probably would have gone septic by now.”

“Jesus,” he says. “And you haven’t seen it since?”

“Nope.” Ahead of them, Vinnie stops and squints at a storage container.

“Padlocked,” he calls back to them. “I don’t see a keypad or anything, but did your tip-off mention a key or backdoor or anything?”

She twists her mouth. “No,” she admits. “Anyone know how to lockpick?”

She looks around. No security guards in sight. Or—she checks under the eaves of the pod, then up at the streetlight they’re under—security cameras.

“Stand back,” she tells Jeff. He looks back at her, focusing through the viewer. “Stand _back_ ,” she says again, and this time he listens.

She starts digging in her bag and pulls out the hatchet. Evan, unsurprisingly, is the first person to piece it together and he grins in delight as she winds up.

Jeff’s eyes widen behind the camera and he says, “Steph, wait—”

Steph grits her teeth and _swings_.

The reverb nearly sends the hatchet spinning out of her hands, but the padlock shackle lies in shards on the floor.

Jeff curses. “Jesus _christ_ —“ He spins around, looking for security guards, but no one comes. “Steph, mother _fuck_ —”

Evan crows a laugh and kicks the useless pieces of metal off to the side. “Well, it’s open!” he says. “Come on, before someone comes sniffing around.”

The early evening light is still strong, but it doesn’t quite manage to reach the back wall of the compartment. She switches on her phone flashlight either way, squinting at the storage containers and cardboard boxes stacked against the walls. “There’s no way we can comb through all of these,” she says, disappointed.

“Well, we can start to, at least,” says Vinnie. “One of us should keep a lookout for a security guard or something.”

“I can,” says Jeff. “Try to grab as much stuff as possible. We have no idea what might help us or not.”

Most of the boxes look like case files and family records. She flips through a box filled with manila folders, each folder containing a name, health records, and page after page of typewritten notes. “Milo Asher,” she reads out. “Benjamin Ertrinken, Clifford Howry, Linnie North. Patients? They’re all kids.”

“Can you find ours?” Vinnie nudges a rocking horse and pulls a face as it begins to rock back and forth on its wooden tracks. “Or anyone with our names?”

She keeps flipping through boxes. Her own name jumps out at her first and she pulls the file out. _Jeffrey Brennan_ , she reads. _Centralia, Pennsylvania. Age committed: 11. Symptoms: hallucinations, dissociation, nightmares, post-traumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideations._ “This is _fucked_ ,” she says out loud. “What—this has to be a coincidence. This is insane.”

The same box has files named _Evan Smith_ and _Vincent Esposito._ She grabs them all without looking at them and keeps combing through boxes.

They work in silence, taking whatever looks pertinent and moving on. She tries not to think about the legality, much less the morality, of shuffling through a dead man’s possessions.

Halfway through her fourth box, she hears Vinnie say “Evan” and freezes. His voice sounds shocked. She leaves the box to look over Vinnie’s shoulder, and in the gloom can feel Evan next to her doing the same.

“Give me some light, Steph,” Vinnie says. “Evan, look at this.”

He’s clutching an old, wrinkled, black-and-white photograph. It looks like a man and a young boy, maybe about twelve or thirteen years old. They’re both smiling, even though the photo is wrinkled and water-damaged enough that the background is beginning to fade. “Look,” says Vinnie. “The kid.”

“What the _fuck_ ,” Evan says. “That kid—that kid looks like _me._ ”

“Yep,” says Vinnie. “Same smile, same hair, same build. Do you—”

“ _No_ ,” Evan says. “Never even seen that guy in my life. What the _fuck_.”

“They say looks skip a generation,” Steph offers. “Maybe it’s…something like that.”

“Fucking _weird_.” Evan takes the picture, flips it over to look at the reverse side, and outside, Jeff shouts in alarm.

The door slams down, shutting out the last rays of light.

Steph feels reality around her shift and tear, but there is no throbbing pressure in her head, no sick warm wet of blood dripping down her face.

The door reopens, and the light is harsh and bright. She can’t hear or see Jeff at all.

In front of her stands a man. His face is exhausted, covered in a five o’clock shadow a few days away from being a scruffy beard. He wears a leather jacket, stained and beaten, and underneath it—if she squints—she can see the glint of a gun. He stares right at her—no, she corrects herself. Right _through_ her.

With slow and exhausted steps, he walks right towards the three of them. In silence, as one, they move to the side and let him by. As if he doesn’t even see them, he walks right past them. He is carrying some sort of plastic boxy device in one hand, and it clicks and ticks unsettlingly.

He sets it down gently on the box Evan had been riffling through two minutes earlier. “I’m sorry,” he says to the empty air. His voice is so tired. “I just.” He sighs. “I wish I could understand why you four, every time, but—” He scrubs at his face, shoulders slumping, then turns to leave.

They watch him leave, none of them daring to move or speak. He opens the door again, and again the sunlight blinds them. The door slams down, and they are left in darkness again.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Evan and Steph say in unison. She flicks her phone flashlight around, letting the light catch their faces. They both look just as confused and as shocked as she is.

“Are we stuck in here?” Vinnie stands up and goes to try the door. She can see even in the dark his arms straining to lift it. “It’s locked,” he says in shock. “Or stuck, or—” He thumps the door. “Jeff!” he shouts. “Jeff, the door went, it’s stuck—”

Reality fuzzes again.

There is something in the corner of the room.

“He’s here,” she says. Her tongue feels thick in her mouth. “It’s him, it’s him again, look—”

Evan shouts in alarm and scrambles back from the corner. The plastic device begins to click rapidly, like a Geiger counter but worse. Her phone flashlight catches on white and black, too tall for any person to be, and she hears Vinnie cursing at Jeff to _open the goddamn door_.

She tries to grab for her hatchet, but there’s too many papers in the way and she can’t risk tearing them, not now—her hand gets tangled in the drawstrings and she presses her back up against the door, feeling it shudder under Vinnie’s fists as he pounds on the metal—

Her hand wavers, sending light bouncing across a room suddenly far too small, and she sees Evan inconceivably dart _toward_ the corner—“ _No_ ,” she screams, but he is fast and quick and he snatches the black box from in front of the thing and backs away.

She can hear muffled shouting from outside the door and the Man tilts his head at the three of them, huddled like animals against the door. Her flashlight blinks out. Her hand tightens around her hatchet even as her head begins to throb.

An almighty screech comes from behind them and, in serendipity, the three of them tumble backwards into the twilight as Jeff finally manages to lever the door up. She lands hard on her side, too shaken to react quickly enough as the door comes up, and before she has time to catch her breath Vinnie is there, pulling her to her feet. “We gotta go, _now_ —”

She casts one fearful look back into the darkness—she can’t see him but she _knows_ he’s there, she can feel him—then lets Vinnie tug her toward the car. They break into a run, Jeff shouting question after question at them until he realizes they’re not going to answer anything until they’re somewhere safe. When they reach the car they pile in, Jeff fumbling to start the car, and they peel out of the parking lot.

“What the fuck _happened_ back there?” he asks once they’re on the highway again.

Evan shook his head. “Literally couldn’t explain what happened if I tried,” he says. “Some guy came in—you didn’t see him? He had a jacket and a beard and he was holding something—”

“I didn’t see anything,” Jeff says. His knuckles are white on the steering wheel and he keeps stealing glances in the rearview mirror back at her and Evan, as if making sure over and over again that they’re all right. “Everything seemed completely normal until the door came down.”

“He didn’t seem like he even saw us,” Vinnie says. “He walked right past us, like we weren’t even there. He put the box down—”

“What box?”

“He was holding some box, it started clicking when fucking _Slenderman_ showed up in the storage container—”

She can see Jeff’s grip tighten even further on the wheel. “ _He_ was there?”

“Why did you think we were banging on the fucking door so much? We’re lucky he didn’t do anything, I—”

“Steph?” Jeff’s eyes meet hers in the rearview mirror. “You’re quiet. You okay?”

Her head pounds when she moves her eyes to meet his gaze. “Headache,” she grits out. “Man doesn’t like me.”

“Hmm.” His eyes go back to the road. “I have Ibuprofen, let me know if you want any. Was anyone hurt?”

“No, not aside from Steph,” says Evan. “I got close to him too, you must have opened the door just in time.”

“You got _close_ to him?” There’s abject shock in Jeff’s voice and he goes up a notch in Steph’s opinion of him. “How fucking _stupid_ are you, Jesus _Christ_ , Ev—”

“It was _fine_ ,” Evan snaps. “I got the box, anyways, and I’m fine now, so—”

“This isn’t important,” Vinnie cuts in. “The important thing is, we’re fine now, and we have a bunch of files to look through. We should just take it as a win that no one was seriously hurt and just move on. Okay?”

Jeff frowns but he doesn’t say anything. Wordlessly, he one-handed fumbles in the glove compartment, digs out a bottle of painkillers, and reaches back to pass it to Steph.

She takes it automatically and unscrews the cap. A familiar orange pill stares back at her. Evan nudges her with his elbow and offers her his water bottle. She nods her thanks at the both of them and takes the painkiller, grimacing at the bitter taste. “Thanks,” she says. Her voice is hoarse.

Jeff nods back at her, keeping his eyes on the road. “How come you get so badly affected by him?” he asks.

Her head throbs and she shuts her eyes, pressing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets. “I don’t know,” she says honestly. “It’s always been like this, ever since he started getting destructive around me. It’s worse though, usually, with nosebleeds too.”

“Like the time in the woods,” Evan says quietly.

“Mmhmm.” The pressure helps, and the lowered voices help more. “I don’t know why you three get off so easy,” she says.

“Lucky, I guess.”

“Yeah. Lucky.”

The ride back is quiet. In the shotgun seat, Vinnie fiddles quietly with the box. Next to her, Evan is quiet for once, near-suicide attempt notwithstanding. The sound of the car moving over the road soothes her in a way she can’t explain, and has absolutely nothing to do with the knowledge that she is surrounded by people she can trust, however conditionally.

When they pull up at her apartment, Evan helps her divvy up an approximate fourth of the files they managed to get out with and makes sure she has a good grasp on them as she gets out of the car.

“Steph,” Jeff says as he rolls down the window. She looks back at him, arms full of tattered manila folders and newspaper clippings. “Are you sure you’re good to be by yourself? With the headache and the Rake and all?”

She smiles a little. “I think I’ll be okay,” she says. “I’ve gone through worse.”

Jeff doesn’t look particularly comforted by that, but he lets it go. “Text us if you find anything interesting,” he says.

“You too.” The car stays there until she swipes into the apartment building and waves at them through the glass door. She watches them drive off, and something yawns open inside her that hasn’t before. Part of her wants to go with them, wants the camaraderie and safety in numbers. The rest of her is scared of that part, and what it means.

The security guard looks a little askance at her, arms full of documents with a suspicious hatchet-like shape in her bag, but she ignores them and takes the elevator up to her own apartment.

Steph does the minimal amount of self-care—frankly she is shocked that she isn’t in a worse state, having come less than ten feet away from the Man himself. A shower is good; something small and easy to eat is better. Her headache is better too, and she doesn’t know whether to attribute that to a relatively light encounter or the Ibuprofen.

She sits down on the floor with a cup of tea and spreads the thirty-odd documents she’s managed to take around her. As an afterthought, she texts Jessa again. _home now, everyone safe, broke into a storage facility and might be arrested but it’s okay_

Jessa doesn’t text back that night, but that’s really nothing new—Steph’s gotten used to texting her then waiting a few hours or even a day or so as she catches up on sleep missed after shifts at the hospital. She begins combing through files, looking for anything pertinent to their own situation or anything unusual—dates not matching up, inexplicable pictures, or locations. She keeps one ear cocked toward her bedroom, listening for the familiar sound of nails down her door.

The tea grows cold. She only manages to get through three or four documents before a picture begins forming around her.

James Corenthal was a doctor. He began specializing in children’s psychology circa the late 1960s, and every single case he examined had a common thread—each child told him they were haunted by a particular _thing,_ not a vague set of symptoms. One girl, Linnie, was dead-set on their being a monster under her bed. A thin, feral, pale white creature that whispered to her as she slept.

From what she could tell, all of the earlier files were more cut-and-dried psychology cases. Childhood trauma, talk therapy, prescribing whatever meds were used in the early 70s. As time went on, he began specializing in the more unusual cases, travelling to meet families across the country as a last-ditch attempt to help their kid.

She sorts the files by decade, and then further by decade into “type” of case. As the years went on, the amount of files dwindled—he became increasingly erratic as he focused more on the unusual cryptid-centered cases. His notes became more aggressive, more confusing, a mix of theorizing and haphazard fixations. The only thing he seemed to be missing was red string.

She still has the four files with their own names on them. The moment she thinks of looking at them her eyes feel like lead.

_Tomorrow_ , she thinks. She will take notes on them and send it to the other three.

She sleeps, and the thing in her closet is silent, and that’s truly all she can ask for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> still on tumblr @a-flickering-soul! come say hi! also PLEASE oh my god please look at this wonderful steph art by creepywormonastring [HERE!!!](https://a-flickering-soul.tumblr.com/post/639695585945010176/click-for-better-quality-some-nights-on-ao3-is) she is wonderful i love every single little detail put in and also this jessa design makes me cry she is ADORABLE!!! go give the artist some love!!!


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